Blizzard has learned 11 lessons on innovation that can help almost any business

innovation.freedomblogging.com

26 points·gordianknot··3 comments

1-7: eerily familiar... Good though to see them backed up by a company outside the web.

8 is interesting. So instead of just building upon the best aspect of the games, they do a lot to improve the worst. Guess that makes sense though given that games generally have a more restricted flow than apps.

9, Another good datapoint in the ongoing debate over "release early to customers" vs "release high quality." Then again, they do use somewhat of a hybrid as I'm sure they have testers before they do the full scale release. Or do they?

10, There are "new" types of games coming out of the console gaming industry? I'm hardly convinced...

A lot of this stuff seems really obvious, but having worked in the game industry, the general view seems to be that "that would all be nice if we could do it". In particular, the quality feedback loop is often sorely missing. This is why there are so many mediocre to bad games. I suspect the reason for this disparity between theory and practice at most publisher-independent studios is some mixture between the iron grip of publishers on developers, and developers' reluctance to even try to do anything about it. Maybe I've missed something though, few of the politics ever seeped through to programmers. (apart from "you're not working hard enough")

if only they actually did all that stuff. they've been promising a new war3 patch for years. if they'd just have one guy making a few small balance changes per month it'd be much better than it is. it's not rocket science to watch pro games and slightly nerf everything you see a lot of, and slightly buff everything you never see, until there is more variety used.

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