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Posts Tagged ‘co:blizzard-entertainment’

Mobile and web content producer Booyah announced today that it received $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins. The two seem like a good match, considering the company’s job listings for iPhone engineers and the investor’s special iPhone developers fund.

The Silicon Valley-based startup remains in stealth mode, and KP is its only named backer so far. Still, there are reasons to believe they might come out with something special. Its founders — Sam Christiansen, Keith Lee and Brian Morrisoe — previously worked at Blizzard Entertainment, home of the World of Warcraft games, as well as Activision and Insomniac Games. Between them, the latter two are responsible for gems like Call of Duty, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Resistance and Ratchet & Clank.

If that doesn’t prime expectations, at least the founders have high hopes for themselves. Their stated goal? To “blow people away with a product that actually improves their life while simultaneously delighting them.” And if that wasn’t enough — “Do good, to help other people do good, to change the world.”

Paul Sams is the chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is a division of Activision Blizzard, the newly created gaming powerhouse created from the $18 billion merger of Activision and Vivendi Games. Sams is one of the top executives responsible for making sure that Blizzard keeps pumping out hits like “World of Warcraft,” which has 10-million-plus paying subscribers.

VB: How many people do you have in Blizzard?

PS: It’s around 3,000 globally.

VB: Will Blizzard will still be left autonomous? And what’s critical about what should be left alone?

PS: From top to bottom. There is not one individual thing or person at Blizzard that is the magic ingredient. We have great people in all departments and regions. All product decisions should stay as they are. We are the only company in the world that has been as successful in all the markets where we participate. We have a global reach. Usually, [when people say they have a global reach, they] just mean they sell in Japan. But we’ve got product across Asia. No other company has been able to do that. We have built a global expertise that none of our other competitors have. It’s hard for them to gain that expertise because you have to start with products that consumers love. That’s why it’s important for Blizzard to continue to run its operations. The Activision leadership understands that. Our merger provides a broad portfolio, with Blizzard in PCs and online games, while Activision is strong in consoles. The combination makes us No. 1. Blizzard knows how to provide Blizzard experiences better than anyone else. The same goes for Activision games, like playing music games in the living room.

VB: But you are open to an exchange of ideas.

PS: Yes, we don’t care where the ideas come from. Just that they’re great. We won’t hesitate to exchange information on how things can be done better.

VB: Your games take a long time compared to the rivals, and your games wind up being better. You took six years on World of Warcraft, while NCSoft took six years on Tabula Rasa and they didn’t get anywhere near the same result.

PS: This may sound boastful. But I believe we have the very best game developers in the world. The key element is they have a recipe. They are the best at their craft, whether that’s programming, art, or sound. Also, we have a rule. We only hire gamers. The very best programmer on the planet could walk into our doors. If he or she isn’t a gamer, we’re not going to hire them. They won’t be right for us. We want people who play the games they are making to be part of the decision-making process. Something that is common among most other publishers is they sit in a big board room and they have a lot of people with button-down shirts, slacks, analyst reports, marketing people, sales people, and finance people. They sit in a room and talk about strategy. Those folks, who may not be gamers, will be making decisions on what the products will be. Then they tell the development team that the next great thing is to do a sailing online game. They can say that they think that sailing is an under-served market and the CEO is really passionate about sailing. The odds are there aren’t a lot of sailors on that development team. At Blizzard, the difference is that we ask the team what they want to make next. At Blizzard, it doesn’t matter what marketing says or what business development says. When you empower developers to make the game they want to play, you have a level of commitment that is unlike anything you are going to get from product concepts handed down from up high based on analyst reports and sales reports. Read the rest of this entry »

The discovery of water on Mars might spur a lot of interest in the science fiction dream of terraforming the Red Planet into a habitable place. That could be good for Avatar Reality, a virtual world company in Honolulu that is building “Blue Mars,” a 3-D world with ambitious graphics and a setting that takes place after the successful colonization of Mars.

It is the brainchild of Kazuo Hashimoto, chief executive officer, and his cofounder Li-Han Chen, vice president of development. It is being bankrolled so far by Henk Rogers, the video game pioneer who discovered Tetris and brought it to the West.

Their virtual world has some of the prettiest graphics I’ve ever seen and is one of the most ambitious in the works; but, then, they’re used to big bets. Their last collaboration was on the “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” movie, a $137 million computer-animated film that was an artistic tour de force when it debuted in 2001 but bombed in the market.

This new venture is another grand undertaking. Hashimoto and Chen started the company at the end of 2006. At that time, Rogers had sold his company Blue Lava Wireless for $137 million to Jamdat Mobile (which EA later bought). Rogers then decided to pour his money into a number of startups. He also started the Blue Planet Foundation, an environmental nonprofit aimed at cleaning up the earth.

“With the NASA news, it will make our story more believable,” said Hashimoto.

While Rogers was obssesed with the idea of terraforming Mars, Chen and Hashimoto thought they could deliver much more realistic avatars, or human characters, in a virtual world. Their experience with the Final Fantasy movie taught them that overly realistic characters didn’t work. Yet they felt that they could do much better than the graphics of avatars in Linden Labs’ “Second Life.” Hashimoto said that the 3-D graphics of Second Life were acceptable to nongamers, but not to gamers. While other popular worlds with cartoon-style graphics are aimed at kids, Blue Mars will be aimed at adults.

“There were many things that people complained about,” Hashimoto said. “We thought we could fix all of those things and that might be a business that would be big enough to interest Henk.”

The Final Fantasy film, whose team was housed in the same Honolulu skyscraper as Avatar Reality and Rogers’ businesses, had more than 240 people working on it. Avatar Reality has 21 employees and will likely build up to 35 people before it launches in 2009. A beta version is expected to be available to the public by the end of 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Blizzard Entertainment had a lot of buzz about its newest game leading up to its European event at the Porte de Versailles event center in Paris. And fans weren’t disappointed with the announcement of its new Diablo III computer game.

That might make a lot of others snore. But with the pending merger of Activision and Vivendi Games (of which Blizzard is a division) about to close, the unveiling of another chapter in another huge franchise shows yet again that Blizzard is the powerhouse of video games.

The company told fans it would ship the game “when it’s ready” and only described the art style of the upcoming game.  As usual, it’s taking forever to get the game done. Blizzard has a team of 50 to 55 people working on it and it has been in production for about four years. That’s the norm for Blizzard, which relentlessly iterates on its games until it feels they’re just right. You can’t argue with such perfectionism. The World of Warcraft online multiplayer game has more than 10 million subscribers.

Blizzard’s Diablo III will be a fantasy real-time role-playing game for the PC and the Mac. The game play? You basically crush as many demons from hell as possible. There is only one strategy to compete with a Blizzard game these days: stay out of the way.

“It’s time to go to war.” That’s how Mark Jacobs opened a recent meeting with analysts at Electronic Arts as he talked about his new online game, “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.” Jacobs started Mythic Entertainment 13 years ago to make online games. He has done 15 such games since founding the company. In 2001, the company launched “Dark Age of Camelot,” which introduced “realm versus realm” combat among thousands of players. Electronic Arts bought his Fairfax, Va., company in 2006. Now, as general manager of EA Mythic, his team of 200 developers is finishing WAR, which is based on Games Workshop’s Warhammer fantasy role-playing-game franchise. That game will be EA’s biggest challenge to Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft,” which has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide. The online version of Warhammer, Jacobs says, is all about going to war, both in the virtual sense, and in the real sense of competing with World of Warcraft.

VB: How is development going on Warhammer Online?
MJ:
It’s going great. We opened a new phase of the beta. We have players running around a city called Praag with sticks and swords.

VB: Can you describe the Warhammer history?
MJ:
The Warhammer franchise was created by Games Workshop in England about 25 years ago. It is the longest and best-selling of all of the fantasy games. It started as toy soldiers, which we call miniatures. It was a tabletop game. You would take the miniatures and do battle with them. Over 25 years, it evolved into Warhammer 40,000 (a sci-fi universe which THQ is working on) and multiple editions of the core Warhammer fantasy universe. They have sold hundreds of millions of toy soldiers. They have 1 million active customers. It can be found even in Asia now. They had a massively multiplayer online (MMO) deal with Climax.

VB: Did you stumble upon the MMO license?
MJ:
Going back five years, one of my friends was working with Games Workshop. They were working with Climax. They wanted to meet with us to see how we make games. We always opened our doors to that kind of thing. Blizzard was one of those who came to visit us.

VB: You didn’t regret that Blizzard visit?
MJ:
I’m really happy that Blizzard was so successful. I’ve been making online games for 20 years. I’ve been waiting for someone to come up with a mass market hit to expand the market. I don’t regret it at all. It was the best thing to happen to online games.

VB: And the license?
MJ:
We showed the Games Workshop guys how we do things. The game went south. GW canceled the Climax license. They came to us and asked us if we would do it. I said no. I told them to take time, think about it, and get together when they were ready. We got a call months later. We eventually worked it out. We signed the deal at E3 in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

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