The problem I have is there doesn't seem to be a deadline... it seems open ended which is allowing them to keep making changes cause "we aren't pressured with a deadline." sure wish i never had a deadline when it comes to school work... obviously going to college teaches no one. if there is a deadline what is the point in having one if it can so easily be changed?
you could spend an eternity on something and it will never be truly perfect.
Steve Jobs revolutionized the world as we know it in 5 years.
He did revolutionize it in 5 years but his invention is dated from the 1980. Google it (origiphone). You'll see iPhone and iPad prototype were being developped and polished since LONG time.
My point is : Maybe Blizz took 10 years to make a game, but NO products in the world were put on the market and quoted as good as quickly as you are saying.
Skyrim (which is the biggest game i have ever played and also of an extremely high quality) started development in 2008 and had a release date for a year of 11/11/11 which they hit perfectly. Now that is time management. It also came out for multiple platforms.
Think about that, diablo 3 will probably be better than skyrim, but I would think by only about 5% at best. Seeing as how much longer D3 took to make and it still isnt even out yet...YEH. I would say there is a product as an example for you.
Funny, you guys still don't get that this whole game is intentional. Cancel your WoW sub yet?
One more time... a recurring 1.5 billion is better than a one-time 250 million, especially when the latter threatens the former.
This is just silly. People who signed up for the annual pass are locked in no matter when D3 comes out (it will be out before the subscription is over).
Most people who plan to stop playing WoW because of D3 have probably already quit WoW (if you know you're quitting soon, why drag it out?)
There will definitely be some people who cancel WoW as a result of the D3 release, but Blizzard is probably lucky if their current subscription fees are even covering the cost of the extended D3 development time. (Hint: delaying the D3 release is not free, and WoW subs aren't 100% profit).
The problem I have is there doesn't seem to be a deadline... it seems open ended which is allowing them to keep making changes cause "we aren't pressured with a deadline." sure wish i never had a deadline when it comes to school work... obviously going to college teaches no one. if there is a deadline what is the point in having one if it can so easily be changed?
I'm sure they have a target date, but Blizzard pretty much never announces these dates until they are pressing discs and getting their supply channels filled. When they announce general time-frames like "end of 2011" or "beginning of 2012" people can try to guess at the actual dates (which is easier to do for an "end of 2011" target than a "beginning of 2012" one). Right now any guess from end of Feb to end of June would probably be a somewhat reasonable guess and with that much uncertainty it feels like they are floating a lot more than they probably are behind the scenes.
As an aside, school deadlines are really nothing like deadlines in the real world (particularly for software development). People don't typically fail to meet school deadlines because they truly didn't have enough time to complete an assignment. Usually they just didn't manage their time as well as they should have (and college assignments tend to take far less time than the actual deadline--people just spend a lot of their time partying and things).
In the software business, project deadlines slip because people truly didn't have enough time to complete the work they were supposed to. This usually isn't because they were slacking off at work--more often its because the timelines for these projects are set months or years in advance of a release date and trying to estimate the time required to complete a project when you typically don't even know exactly what that work will entail by the end is very difficult. In addition, people have a tendency to under-estimate these sorts of things (because they don't leave enough time to deal with unexpected issues) so deadline slips are more common than they probably should be. This sort of optimism also means that if an intermediate milestone is late, the release date often isn't update to reflect this slippage because people think "well, maybe we can gain some time later and still make the original target".
Skyrim (which is the biggest game i have ever played and also of an extremely high quality) started development in 2008 and had a release date for a year of 11/11/11 which they hit perfectly. Now that is time management. It also came out for multiple platforms.
Think about that, diablo 3 will probably be better than skyrim, but I would think by only about 5% at best. Seeing as how much longer D3 took to make and it still isnt even out yet...YEH. I would say there is a product as an example for you.
Skyrim is also a bug-infested, highly exploited pile of crap single player game without intricate features like a RMAH. They made their release date - so what. A pile of crap is still a pile of crap no matter how good Skyrim's graphics are.
Funny, you guys still don't get that this whole game is intentional. Cancel your WoW sub yet?
One more time... a recurring 1.5 billion is better than a one-time 250 million, especially when the latter threatens the former.
This is just silly. People who signed up for the annual pass are locked in no matter when D3 comes out (it will be out before the subscription is over).
Most people who plan to stop playing WoW because of D3 have probably already quit WoW (if you know you're quitting soon, why drag it out?)
There will definitely be some people who cancel WoW as a result of the D3 release, but Blizzard is probably lucky if their current subscription fees are even covering the cost of the extended D3 development time. (Hint: delaying the D3 release is not free, and WoW subs aren't 100% profit).
No disrespect, but you're wrong on a few levels. Every level of management is concerned about cannibalization, and it is the only explanation for why the game has been in design-based turnaround for 9 months, and why they consciously chose to throw in the RMAH, which they had to have known would be a regulatory monkey-wrench.
And I wouldn't worry about WoW subs covering development - even if you factor in the bloated salaries in their cinematics team, D3 still burns 50mil/year tops on the dev side. That's two weeks of WoW revenue. Which is my entire point - there is no entertainment product in the universe with WoW's margins, and even chipping away 10-15% at that base (which is not unlikely, especially if the online experience has any depth) is incredibly bad business. And, make no mistake, there is a ton of overlap between the two games in terms of the audience, and a limited amount of gaming time all but the most commited (and unemployed) nerds have.
Funny, less and less people argue this point as the obviously intentional delays make it clearer, but I thank you for continuing to fight the good fight with manners.
Funny, less and less people argue this point as the obviously intentional delays make it clearer, but I thank you for continuing to fight the good fight with manners.
Sure, Doez, it seems like a conspiracy if you've never worked in the corporate world and don't know what 1.5 bil on a regular basis with >50% margins means.
Nope, I have no idea! What is a 50% margin?!?! Does it mean that when you tab over in Microsoft Word that the cursor goes to the middle of the page????
Oh, you must mean the cost to produce a product vs. the price it's sold at multiplied by the quantities sold. Or maybe revenue in vs. maintenance costs. You can take off the tinfoil hat because there are no "intentional delays." Investors only care about their return on the investment and will not stand for that. The longer the game is delayed, the less in their return, no matter how any other product is doing for Blizzard.
The longer the game is delayed, the less in their return, no matter how any other product is doing for Blizzard.
Uh... unless that product directly competes with an established product, and the new competing product is a one-time sale with fairly crappy margins, and the established one makes exponentially more on a recurring basis.
Of course, I defer to your superior experience, being in the hotbed of technology and business development known as Cleveland.
Of course, I defer to your superior experience, being in the hotbed of technology and business development known as Cleveland.
You probably should defer, Mr. Anonymous. WoW isn't going to permanently lose enough customers to notice a difference. The chances are extremely high that those addicted to WoW will stay addicted, and they are doing everything they can with future expansions to appeal to non-customers to give the game a shot. D3 will co-exist with one-time sales and the RMAH will bring in a steady cash flow from all over the world. You have no idea what the margins are for D3 and neither do I.
I find it hilarious that you think D3 costs them $50 million a year in development. Maybe I should move out to Cali with all the tree hugging hippy liberals so I too can make $400k+ a year like the rest of them and blow $250 million to make D3!
That pile of crap not only won the game of the year award at VGA and is critically aclaimed by basically every game magazine out there but it also shipped 10 million copies and broke the steam sales record as the fastest selling game. http://www.vg247.com...s-steam-record/
I don't why you sound like a raging little kid but take a deep breath and think for a second and you'll realize that Skyrim given the development time and reviews and sales all points to huge success no matter your personal vendetta towards the game.
I don't care what awards it has won, and I never said it wasn't popular, so learn how to read before you think I was actually raging about it. You guys are comparing two companies, their initial release dates, and who lived up to it. Skyrim is a buggy pile of crap and exploited at the master difficulty, but I guess it makes the game better because they released on time!!!! Right?
Edit-
Sorry that Blizzard isn't copy/pasting everything from D2 into D3 to pump out games every year or 2 like the Oblivion series and Call of Duty series does. I guess that makes them inferior to Bethesda, EA, etc.
Maybe I should move out to Cali with all the tree hugging hippy liberals so I too can make $400k+ a year like the rest of them
Funny. You think a senior programmer or old-school cinematics guy costs much less after bonuses, benefits, payroll tax and general facilities maintenance? Of course, you also probably think that Irvine is analagous to a place like Santa Cruz or Santa Monica in terms of 'tree huggers'. I sense a trend here in your general knowledge of things.
Funny. You think a senior programmer or old-school cinematics guy costs much less after bonuses, benefits, payroll tax and general facilities maintenance? Of course, you also probably think that Irvine is analagous to a place like Santa Cruz or Santa Monica in terms of 'tree huggers'. I sense a trend here in your general knowledge of things.
Funny that this is the only snippet you can respond to. Now kindly shut the hell up so I can shut the hell up and be done with you, 45 year old troll. Keep rocking that tin foil hat and living on the idea that Blizzard is intentionally delaying D3's release.
Funny that this is the only snippet you can respond to.
No, I could respond to a number of other misconceptions you have, but I'll just let the lack of a release date in the next few months speak for itself, and enjoy the sound of silence as the last few people here realize what I've been saying for a couple years now is, sadly, true.
A senior employee at Bliz making in two months what you make in a year is funny, isn't it? How about it being a pleasant 63 degrees in Irvine while you're getting snowed on at 22 degrees? Also absurd and unimaginable, I'm sure.
Well if you want to compare salaries, I guess with you being a Wal-Mart greeter, they make more than you in about 30 seconds than you do in a month. If senior guys really make $80k in 2 months, more power to them. I'm not jealous in the least.
Just FYI Doez is (mostly) right, minus the whole tree hugging part. If you want to say D3 will make WoW lose subscriptions, but point at Skyrim's development being so fantastic, why didn't Skyrim affect WoW's subscriptions, or SWTOR, or any of those other groundbreaking titles that came out? There's a few million people that have zero interest in Diablo, and there's a few million more that haven't played any PC game before WoW... so no interest there, either.
They wouldn't purposefully lose money by NOT releasing D3 and NOT getting all the RMAH fees during this period unless they had hard evidence that accurately showed they would lose more money by releasing it. That's not how business works.
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you could spend an eternity on something and it will never be truly perfect.
Skyrim (which is the biggest game i have ever played and also of an extremely high quality) started development in 2008 and had a release date for a year of 11/11/11 which they hit perfectly. Now that is time management. It also came out for multiple platforms.
Think about that, diablo 3 will probably be better than skyrim, but I would think by only about 5% at best. Seeing as how much longer D3 took to make and it still isnt even out yet...YEH. I would say there is a product as an example for you.
This is just silly. People who signed up for the annual pass are locked in no matter when D3 comes out (it will be out before the subscription is over).
Most people who plan to stop playing WoW because of D3 have probably already quit WoW (if you know you're quitting soon, why drag it out?)
There will definitely be some people who cancel WoW as a result of the D3 release, but Blizzard is probably lucky if their current subscription fees are even covering the cost of the extended D3 development time. (Hint: delaying the D3 release is not free, and WoW subs aren't 100% profit).
Agree 100%
I'm sure they have a target date, but Blizzard pretty much never announces these dates until they are pressing discs and getting their supply channels filled. When they announce general time-frames like "end of 2011" or "beginning of 2012" people can try to guess at the actual dates (which is easier to do for an "end of 2011" target than a "beginning of 2012" one). Right now any guess from end of Feb to end of June would probably be a somewhat reasonable guess and with that much uncertainty it feels like they are floating a lot more than they probably are behind the scenes.
As an aside, school deadlines are really nothing like deadlines in the real world (particularly for software development). People don't typically fail to meet school deadlines because they truly didn't have enough time to complete an assignment. Usually they just didn't manage their time as well as they should have (and college assignments tend to take far less time than the actual deadline--people just spend a lot of their time partying and things).
In the software business, project deadlines slip because people truly didn't have enough time to complete the work they were supposed to. This usually isn't because they were slacking off at work--more often its because the timelines for these projects are set months or years in advance of a release date and trying to estimate the time required to complete a project when you typically don't even know exactly what that work will entail by the end is very difficult. In addition, people have a tendency to under-estimate these sorts of things (because they don't leave enough time to deal with unexpected issues) so deadline slips are more common than they probably should be. This sort of optimism also means that if an intermediate milestone is late, the release date often isn't update to reflect this slippage because people think "well, maybe we can gain some time later and still make the original target".
Skyrim is also a bug-infested, highly exploited pile of crap single player game without intricate features like a RMAH. They made their release date - so what. A pile of crap is still a pile of crap no matter how good Skyrim's graphics are.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
No disrespect, but you're wrong on a few levels. Every level of management is concerned about cannibalization, and it is the only explanation for why the game has been in design-based turnaround for 9 months, and why they consciously chose to throw in the RMAH, which they had to have known would be a regulatory monkey-wrench.
And I wouldn't worry about WoW subs covering development - even if you factor in the bloated salaries in their cinematics team, D3 still burns 50mil/year tops on the dev side. That's two weeks of WoW revenue. Which is my entire point - there is no entertainment product in the universe with WoW's margins, and even chipping away 10-15% at that base (which is not unlikely, especially if the online experience has any depth) is incredibly bad business. And, make no mistake, there is a ton of overlap between the two games in terms of the audience, and a limited amount of gaming time all but the most commited (and unemployed) nerds have.
Funny, less and less people argue this point as the obviously intentional delays make it clearer, but I thank you for continuing to fight the good fight with manners.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
Oh, you must mean the cost to produce a product vs. the price it's sold at multiplied by the quantities sold. Or maybe revenue in vs. maintenance costs. You can take off the tinfoil hat because there are no "intentional delays." Investors only care about their return on the investment and will not stand for that. The longer the game is delayed, the less in their return, no matter how any other product is doing for Blizzard.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
Uh... unless that product directly competes with an established product, and the new competing product is a one-time sale with fairly crappy margins, and the established one makes exponentially more on a recurring basis.
Of course, I defer to your superior experience, being in the hotbed of technology and business development known as Cleveland.
You probably should defer, Mr. Anonymous. WoW isn't going to permanently lose enough customers to notice a difference. The chances are extremely high that those addicted to WoW will stay addicted, and they are doing everything they can with future expansions to appeal to non-customers to give the game a shot. D3 will co-exist with one-time sales and the RMAH will bring in a steady cash flow from all over the world. You have no idea what the margins are for D3 and neither do I.
I find it hilarious that you think D3 costs them $50 million a year in development. Maybe I should move out to Cali with all the tree hugging hippy liberals so I too can make $400k+ a year like the rest of them and blow $250 million to make D3!
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
I don't care what awards it has won, and I never said it wasn't popular, so learn how to read before you think I was actually raging about it. You guys are comparing two companies, their initial release dates, and who lived up to it. Skyrim is a buggy pile of crap and exploited at the master difficulty, but I guess it makes the game better because they released on time!!!! Right?
Edit-
Sorry that Blizzard isn't copy/pasting everything from D2 into D3 to pump out games every year or 2 like the Oblivion series and Call of Duty series does. I guess that makes them inferior to Bethesda, EA, etc.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
Funny. You think a senior programmer or old-school cinematics guy costs much less after bonuses, benefits, payroll tax and general facilities maintenance? Of course, you also probably think that Irvine is analagous to a place like Santa Cruz or Santa Monica in terms of 'tree huggers'. I sense a trend here in your general knowledge of things.
Funny that this is the only snippet you can respond to. Now kindly shut the hell up so I can shut the hell up and be done with you, 45 year old troll. Keep rocking that tin foil hat and living on the idea that Blizzard is intentionally delaying D3's release.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
No, I could respond to a number of other misconceptions you have, but I'll just let the lack of a release date in the next few months speak for itself, and enjoy the sound of silence as the last few people here realize what I've been saying for a couple years now is, sadly, true.
A senior employee at Bliz making in two months what you make in a year is funny, isn't it? How about it being a pleasant 63 degrees in Irvine while you're getting snowed on at 22 degrees? Also absurd and unimaginable, I'm sure.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
Blah
They wouldn't purposefully lose money by NOT releasing D3 and NOT getting all the RMAH fees during this period unless they had hard evidence that accurately showed they would lose more money by releasing it. That's not how business works.