Morhaime talks change at Blizzard following WoW
Austin's Game Developers Conference -- Austin being the MMO capital of the US -- kicked off one of its early events with a speech by Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. He tells the story of just how unprepared they were for World of Warcraft's success saying, "We had to shift our mindset that we were not just a game publisher or developer. We were now a service company." The company has swelled from a a few hundred to 2,500 employees in the span of a few years. Much of that is to support the massive infrastructure necessary to keep the World of Warcraft running.
He says the early months of WoW they couldn't have been prepared for. They set Warcraft III as their sales expectation ceiling on WoW and prepared for that -- it sounded reasonable at the time. Of course WoW ended up being almost too popular and the game was close to unplayable half the time in its first six months. Morhaime says that's when they had to shift everything. He goes on to say that Blizzard's name standing for quality has helped them out immensely and he stressed for developers to always finish their games before release. The money a company makes in the short term won't fix a poisoned name in the long run.
