Blizzard has been having a very rough time recently. For starters, the studio has been facing backlash for the announcement of a mobile version of the Diablo franchise. Then, a few months after that, the company earned the ire of its community after it suspended a Hearthstone player who supported the Hong Kong protests.
It is safe to say that these things are not great when it comes to running a company like Blizzard. In the midst of the chaos the studio is facing, the original creators of the hit Diablo series have surfaced and given their take on the narrative.
In an interview, Blizzard North founders David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, and Max Schaefer revealed that the studio has “completely” changed from what it was used to be. In case you did not know, these developers decided to quit the company a couple of years ago.
"The old Blizzard is gone," Max Schaefer said. "When we quit, there was like 180 employees total. There's thousands now. The whole empire is different, and Activision didn't have any influence. At that point it was just Blizzard and then some anonymous corporate owner, Vivendi or whoever. That was it. And so now [Blizzard is] a video game empire that has to appease shareholders and all that sort of stuff."
Brevik, on the other hand, explained that the changes to how the studio operates were to be expected. According to him, the company grew into a massive corporation, far from what anyone would have imagined in the past. The three developers also added that they already expected this to happen even when they were still working on making Diablo 2. As the studio grew, according to them, they eventually found themselves dealing more and more with company politics.
"I think the biggest thing is we didn't talk about shareholder value," Erich Schaefer said. "We didn't talk about Chinese government and what they might want. The only thing we ever talked about was what we wanted to do and what the fans would like. It's obviously not the case anymore, for better or worse. I don't blame them. They're a giant corporation."
