Blizzard Entertainment reviews

Support teams still looked down on/seen as cost centers. No CTO currently. New President is still getting up to speed. Budgets are tight and getting worse. Unwillingness to fire people who aren’t actually a fit for the position they’re hired for. Deeply toxic internal politics between departments (particularly, Battle.Net vs. the rest of the company, Battle.Net vs itself).

After project Titan failed, things changed dramatically at Blizzard. It went from being a design house to a production house. Now we have producers and business people dictating the direction and scope for games instead of the developers themselves designing great new features for their game. I've been to too many meetings where producers outnumbered actual game developers, which has created a culture of micro-management and over-lording. The producers don't do a good job of listening to the developers and what the developers think are best for the project and instead dictate from on high based on conversations with business and marketing people about what should be done next for each game. The company is very risk averse at this point and the executives are unwilling to layout a vision for the future (or maybe just don't know what we should be doing). Unless it is a competitive PvP game, the company upper management feels hostile towards other styles of games that it could be successful in.