第1个回答 2008-12-13
BusinessWeek recently published a new article exploring the success of Blizzard Entertainment. The article examines the company's successful Craft franchises, it's efforts to keep in touch with gamers' wants, and its willingness to discard games before release if they aren't "fun enough."
Indeed, the 250-person outfit has become one the games industry's leading innovators, creating games that players crave and profitable new businesses that rival executives envy. "[They're] essentially design geniuses, making games easy enough for casual players and deep enough to attract and hook hard-core players," says Jeff Green, editor-in-chief of online gaming magazine 1Up.com. "Simple to learn, difficult to master is the holy grail of game design," he adds. "Blizzard does this every single time."
As Wilson suggests, Blizzard's purpose is simple: to make fun games. Sounds easy enough, but the task is complicated by the nature of modern video games, which can require development budgets rivaling those of blockbuster Hollywood releases or major corporate product rollouts. As the games industry has emerged as a serious business, Blizzard's hallmark has been its effective and persistent effort to remain in touch with players.
It's also learned to feed on criticism. Betas of future expansions to World of Warcraft include reporting software that allows players to offer instant feedback from within the game. Employees endlessly play and replay games both on and off the clock, constantly looking to make improvements. At lunch, "strike teams" play concentrated sessions of games in development to provide feedback. "You know a game is ready when management has to send e-mails out after lunch begging people to get back to work," jokes Wilson. Some designers even plan vacations to coincide with major release dates in order to play alongside regular consumers.
Why does Blizzard succeed where others don't?" asks Jay Wilson, a lead game designer with a shock of spiked hair and a wry disposition. "It isn't a magic trick. We work at it, and if a product isn't good enough, we cancel it."
Blizzard Entertainment, of course, is the Irvine (Calif.)-based maker of the world's most popular and profitable online game, World of Warcraft (WoW), which boasts nearly 11 million monthly subscribers around the globe. The company is also at the heart of the recent $18.9 billion merger with Activision, primarily a maker of console titles such as Guitar Hero and Call of Duty. Born in early July, the newly combined entity, Activision Blizzard (ATVI), is now the industry's biggest player, with projected annual revenues of nearly $4.5 billion.
But Activision is acquiring much more than World of Warcraft. Blizzard is behind a string of best-selling, industry-shaping PC games including the StarCraft and Diablo series, which have sold nearly 10 million and 20 million copies, respectively. The new company is also tapping into a corporate culture that champions creativity, both productive and experimental, inspiring enduring devotion from paying players.
Company Changed Hands Several Times
Blizzard began life in 1991, founded by UCLA graduates Allen Adham, Frank Pearce, and Michael Morhaime, currently the firm's CEO, as a group of coders-for-hire toiling on other companies' games. The 1994 release of Warcraft vaulted the company toward becoming one of the most admired and profitable game makers in the world. (That year, the company was purchased for $10 million by distributor Davidson & Associates and changed hands a number of times before finally coming under the control of Vivendi Universal (VIV.PA) in 1998.) Like Disney's (DIS) Pixar animation studio or electronics impresario Apple (AAPL), Blizzard has stayed ahead of competitors.
Indeed, the 250-person outfit has become one the games industry's leading innovators, creating games that players crave and profitable new businesses that rival executives envy. "[They're] essentially design geniuses, making games easy enough for casual players and deep enough to attract and hook hard-core players," says Jeff Green, editor-in-chief of online gaming magazine 1Up.com. "Simple to learn, difficult to master is the holy grail of game design," he adds. "Blizzard does this every single time."
As Wilson suggests, Blizzard's purpose is simple: to make fun games. Sounds easy enough, but the task is complicated by the nature of modern video games, which can require development budgets rivaling those of blockbuster Hollywood releases or major corporate product rollouts. As the games industry has emerged as a serious business, Blizzard's hallmark has been its effective and persistent effort to remain in touch with players.
Learning from Criticism
It's also learned to feed on criticism. Betas of future expansions to World of Warcraft include reporting software that allows players to offer instant feedback from within the game. Employees endlessly play and replay games both on and off the clock, constantly looking to make improvements. At lunch, "strike teams" play concentrated sessions of games in development to provide feedback. "You know a game is ready when management has to send e-mails out after lunch begging people to get back to work," jokes Wilson
Some designers even plan vacations to coincide with major release dates in order to play alongside regular consumers.
And the company has boldly canned numerous products, even nearly finished games it deemed "not fun enough." An adventure spinoff based on the Warcraft franchise was ditched in 1998 despite widespread press coverage and high consumer anticipation. Blizzard executives make a habit of listing the many games that never made it out the door, including a long-delayed StarCraft-themed game for consoles that was first announced in 2002 but put on hold indefinitely in 2006 as the company grappled with the difficulties of the different platform. New games, meanwhile, are announced with ship dates of "when it's done."
These days, Blizzard presides over an ever-expanding universe composed of not only blockbuster games but also action figures, novels, manga, board games, pen-and-paper role-playing games, apparel, and conferences. In South Korea, where competitive video gaming is a televised sport, Blizzard's decade-old game StarCraft inspires such fervent loyalty that tournaments still draw some 700,000 spectators a year, nurturing a niche industry worth $40 million annually. Legendary Pictures, the studio behind blockbuster comic book adaptations like Batman Begins and 300, is currently working on a big-budget, live-action film based on WoW slated for 2009.
Bringing Together Two Well-Oiled Machines
Unlike other mergers, aimed at bolstering sagging businesses or nabbing market share, analysts widely deem Activision Blizzard to be the rare union of two well-oiled machines. Steve Bailey, an analyst with London market research firm Screen Digest, notes that Activision's console expertise could help Blizzard make the jump to the dedicated game systems produced by Microsoft (MSFT), Nintendo (7974.T), and Sony (SNE). According to Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles, the deal should insulate Activision from the more seasonal console market, which peaks in a parental buying frenzy at Christmas. Instead, some of WoW's profits—as much as $600 million annually—can be put toward new products.
But for all the ink spilled over the Activision-Blizzard mega-merger and the attention paid to World of Warcraft—the game has been used in Toyota (TM) truck ads and parodied by South Park—the company's biggest releases could lie ahead. Executives have committed to releasing one new WoW expansion pack every year to keep the title competitive and to keep players paying the $15 a month subscription fee. Last year, it announced StarCraft II, a sequel to the firm's science-fiction strategy game. And, in June, the company showed the first footage of Diablo III, another highly anticipated sequel in development since 2005.
Some fans howled at Diablo III's public unveiling, complaining that the art direction too closely resembled that of World of Warcraft. The flap, to which designers quickly responded with an open letter explaining their choices, is evidence that Blizzard could yet stumble. Now, the game maker must deliver on its widening roster of games while making inroads into new genres and markets—all without abandoning the methods that, to date, have made it a darling with players and executives alike.
就是这个了- - 给我吧- - 200分- -
第2个回答 2008-12-07
以下是Blizzard的介绍加上负责人的一些抱负与说法。
可参考以下网址。
Operating without corporate interference has been a key to the company's success, said Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime.
Speaking at the D.I.C.E. Summit 2008, Morhaime and Blizzard VPs Rob Pardo and Frank Pearce detailed the company's early history on the eve of its seventeenth year.
When the company was purchased by Davidson in 1994, the new owner had a hands-off approach. "They told us 'We'll give you full creative control. We don't want to change anything you are doing'", said Morhaime.
"We had the illusion that, even though we had sold the company, that we still owned it - or still had the control to do the things we wanted to do or make the games we wanted to play."
When Davidson sold the company, Blizzard already had a track record and were able to continue operating in the same fashion — which Morhaime notes as a factor of their success over the years.
CUC acquired Davidson in 1996, then merged to form Cendant in 1997. Vivendi-owned Havas acquired Cendant in 1999, shortly before Vivendi acquired Universal.
"If you look at these companies, most of these entities don't know anything about game development," said Frank Pearce, referring to the many corporations that have owned Blizzard over the years. "That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending upon how they view the studio beneath them."
He noted that Morhaime had kept the developers isolated from what the corporate owners were doing, allowing them to focus on making games.
Rob Pardo, who joined the company after Pearce and Morhaime had already been there, noted the lack of corporate interference. "From the point I started to even the point I am now as an exec, it is pretty rare to see people from our parent company at Blizzard.
"They don't walk around the halls. We don't show them or games for greenlight or approval process," he said. "That's something I always thought was amazing working at Blizzard."
Morhaime provided an example of what went wrong when they relied upon a corporation to their detriment. "We actually did a deal with Interplay to do the French distribution for Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.
"Back then, we had copy protection — "enter word 5 on page 5" of the manual. [Interplay] didn't actually localise the game into French, but they localised the manual."
Blizzard was shocked that a game could be released with such a major flaw going unnoticed, and from then on their own QA group has been responsible for testing their products — no matter what language they are in.
Blizzard, currently owned by Vivendi, will remain with the company as part of the Activision Blizzard merger which was announced last year.
"Once the Activision Blizzard merger goes through, Bobby Kotick will be my eighth boss," said Morhaime, pointing to his experience bridging Blizzard with its parent company so that both are comfortable.
"We actually have a term for that," Pearce said. "We talk about how Mike has to train his new boss every time he gets a new boss," to which Morhaime reluctantly admitted, "We talk about that in the office," to laughter from the crowd.
"Maybe that won't need to be done with Bobby as he's been in the industry for a while," Pearce explained, recovering quickly.
The trio went on to detail Blizzard's development process and the learning curve expanding World of Warcraft globally and Pearce noted that their track record is impressive largely because they have been willing to delay or cancel products in the long-term interest of the Blizzard brand name.
"We've been fortunate because we have a strong enough track record to be able to make these tough decisions and feel confident that ultimately it will work out in the long run,â Morhaime said.
"The worst thing we could do is put out a game which doesnât live up to our quality expectations."
我也缩写了一些Blizzard成功的理由以便参考。如下:
Blizzard Entertainment, the envy of the computer game industry, has become widely successful due to various reasons. Firstly, Blizzard insists on using own product and designs its games to appeal to a variety of customers. Then also Blizzard welcomes criticisms both during game development and after the launch, when games need to be fine-tuned and freshened up and are willing to make continual developments. The creators will throw out unsuccessful work rather than try to salvage a fatally flawed plan. Blizzard also makes use of statistics to find ways to make games more enjoyable. It is not just any computer-game company; it is a type of company that can provide employees with more than just a paycheck. It believes that an innovator needs something beyond just monetary incentives.
参考资料：http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/dice
第4个回答 2008-12-07
Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer and publisher headquartered in Irvine, California.[1] It is a division of Activision Blizzard. Blizzard is the creator of several successful computer games, including World of Warcraft and the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo series.
History
Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime, Ayman Allen Adham and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, a year after[3] all three had received their bachelor's degrees from UCLA.[4][3] In the early days the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Ports include titles such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess.[5][6] In 1993, the company developed games like Rock N' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.
Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired along with Sierra On-Line by a company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On-line which included Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard was part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi. In July 2008 Vivendi Games merged with Activision, using Blizzard's name in the resulting company, Activision Blizzard.
In 1996, Blizzard acquired Condor Games, which had been working on the game Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, and has since developed hit games Diablo, Diablo II, and its expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Blizzard North was located in San Mateo, California.
Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles from Interplay Entertainment and re-release them under Game Boy Advance.[7] In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Vélizy, Yvelines, France, responsible for the European in-game support of World of Warcraft. On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, its MMORPG offering. On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing StarCraft: Ghost. The company was then merged into Blizzard's other teams after StarCraft: Ghost was 'postponed indefinitely'. On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters at 131 Theory in UC Irvine's University Research Park in Irvine, California.
In 2008, Blizzard was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the creation of World of Warcraft. Mike Morhaime accepted the award.
补充答案：
So this is marginally on topic, but I saw this on /. today. This is some kind of business porn bullshit from some local Orange County paper containing a bunch of platitudes about Blizzard's success with World of Warcraft. Frankly, this article could have been written about any arbitrary product, and is 50% bullshit. So I want to offer my 11 counterpoints on why WoW is such a hit.
1. Quality of people matters.
Blizzard hires quality people and generally pays them commensurate with their value. This might seem like it belongs in the source article, but in the games world, this is actually rare.
2. Innovation is bunk.
I love WoW, and I know the market, unlike the douche who writes for OCRegister. Yes, Blizzard makes exponential-ambient-ass-loads of money off WoW. However, and I have said this since the day the game shipped -- there is not a single iota of innovation anywhere in WoW. It is an identical, if not more limiting mechanical structure for a game relative to what other people had put out. In fact, the success of WoW might actually have a globally chilling effect on the MMOG market for the next decade. This, however, leads in to the next few points:
3. Fuck your product. Know, use, and love your competition.
Dogfooding is a common practice in all software businesses. Where you will really win is understanding why people love other products. Without naming any names here, a great example is NetBeans. I know Sun does all their internal development with NetBeans. They eat their own dogfood. What does this tell them? A good bit, really. However, it omits the knowledge of why people who use them like Eclipse or LOVE IntelliJ IDEA. You should have on your staff people who adore your competitors products, and use them all the time. This tells you not just where you can improve your product for the people who drank your kool-aid, but how you can WIN in the marketplace. WoW has almost no aspects to its gameplay that EverQuest didn't pioneer. All WoW is, in essence, is EQ with the crap that annoyed people fixed. Sony went wrong by actually trying to innovate (see #2) with EQ II, and that is (part of) why WoW ate their lunch.
4. Expand a market by doing better.
I see this all the time. Great example: MapQuest. MapQuest was a verb for a lot of people the same way "Google" is a verb. However, Google Maps came out and redefine the space. You can argue that Google Maps was innovative, but it wasn't "Cotton Gin" innovative. It was maybe "Fluorescent Light" innovative at best. They took an established market that they knew was big, and expanded it by pwning on the little things of the UI. WoW, in much the same way, came into a huge MMOG market, and expanded it by not shipping a shit product.
5. It is done when it is done.
This has been a hallmark of both Blizzard and id Software for years. I think neither company has made a ship date in two decades, but when they ship a product it is -- not just reasonably bug free -- but tweaked. For a game company this mean the mechanics are exceedingly well balanced. Buffs and Nerfs aside, it is clear to most people that WoW, and the whole *Craft brand, ships with an incredibly well balance gameplay for all the roles and classes when the game ships. Let me restate this point with another axiom: it matters less if it works 100%, than if it provides the utility the customer expects.
Note: Please don't confuse this with "Demand Excellence." If you are a manager and (a) you can't describe excellence when you see it or (b) don't use the competitors products (See above), then your "demand" is just so much posturing.
6. Personality matters, and that isn't from a committee.
WoW, like many Blizzard products, has a whole lot of character. Whether this is the Ghostbusters jokes in the Mage quests of WoW or the numerous SciFi classics references in StarCraft, the products reflect the love of the developers for genre products. This can't be designed by a marketing group. You need writers and developers who honest-to-god connect with the market. There was a chat at Java Posse Roundup with Joe about UI design and "how does this software make you feel." I brought up WoW and games in general, because this is one of the few areas in the industry where this isn't just a consideration, but the whole game plan (pun intended). The best way to establish brand loyalty is to make users feel connected with the people who develop the product. Oh, BTW...
7. Brand is incredibly important.
For all the talk in the business section about EA, Activision, or (Blizzard parent and Activision merger target) Vivendi, gamers know they are shit. Who cares about the shovelware churn factories? Sure, you might buy Madden whatever or NHLXX[XX], but in the end, you don't care about these companies. Yet another FIFA title doesn't matter nearly as much as StarCraft 2, Spore, or even Rainbow 6 Las Vegas 2. Pumping out products with marginal difference to collect your $60 and pass go again can make you a lot of money, but it won't earn you brand loyalty. However, when *Blizzard* the people who made both Diablo (huge in the US) and StarCraft (huge in the US but an absolute runnaway in Asia) say they are making an MMOG, assuming it matched 1..6 here, it will bury Lineage in Asia and the whole SOE portfolio in the US. Speaking of SOE...
8. Customer support matters.
Your product has bugs. Your product will get hacked. The question is, what happens when this happens? If your customer support experience has 1 bad outcome in 10, it will be all over the Internet. Moreover, if you have long term users, like many MMOGs do, if a customer needs help once a year, after 3 years a third of your user base hates your ever-loving guts. Seriously, ask anybody who played a Sony Online game.
9. Control expectations.
If you have a non-user deterministic software product (Google Search) you can talk about six-sigma uptime. Otherwise, if you have a product where the operational mechanics are critical (MMOG, Banking, ISPs) you will have downtime. Be upfront with the customers. Schedule outages fairly and tell your operations team to actually post to the Network Status page on your web site. While you deal with a lot of retards, if you have a status page and it shows you know and are making a good college try to deal with a problem, you will save yourself hundreds, if not thousands of contacts to customer support, and that will drive up your value in #8.
10. Operations is a competitive advantage.
TechOps is critical and has to be part of the development process. One of the reasons "patch day" (See #9) isn't as bad for WoW as [insert other preceeding MMOG here] is because they adopted BitTorrent for patch distribution. If you don't have your head firmly up your ass, you understand that BitTorrent increases burst network capacity (at least) linearly with demand for large files. For WoW this meant that in spite of limited download capacity, the distribution of 100+ MB patches never left the user screaming about sub-dialup download speeds. Of course, this also saved Blizzard tons of money. Whether you use Torrents like Blizzard or use high-burst capable systems like Amazon S3 and EC2, if you aren't planning for the surge, you are doing it wrong. Which leads to the last point...
11. Make it as easy as possible for me to give you money.
While surge in the first week brought the billing system for Star Wars Galaxies (read:Sony) to its knees, it didn't affect the game servers, so game servers were left idle why people TRiED to give SOE money. This goes to many other aspects of the purchase experience though. Fuck your demographic surveys. Seriously. Every screen between "Page 1 Hit" and "I have your money" reduces the chance of you getting paid. Moreoever, making it hard to get to a product on your web site is a bad idea. If you sell software and I can't buy it without ever talking to you, you are not likely going to get my money. This isn't just for games, this is about any kind of software or SaaS.
12: BONUS! Projects need to not just fail fast, they need vestment.
It was striking to me how "Ghost" the StarCraft franchise stealth game wasn't listed in the "Failed Blizzard Products" section of the article. Ghost was a hugely anticipated game and has teetered on being Blizzard's Duke Nukem Forever. However, the tale of why development stopped is compelling:
And as far as Ghost goes, we love that game concept and we consciously said that we're putting it on indefinite hold. The game didn't get made because we didn't love the character and we didn't love the concept. It didn't get made because it wasn't coming together in the way we wanted it to and we wanted to focus on our other projects. As I said earlier, if we had a development team available and they had a passion to do Ghost, we'd probably let them do it. That's what it would take.
Much like Google's controversial, and confusing to some, self-selection for teams, this shows that Blizzard doesn't want to put out a game where the team isn't on board with 1..5, even if the company is on board for the rest of these points.本回答被提问者采纳