E-sports, community and AI fly in Blizzard’s winds of change
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Blizzard fans aren’t what you’d call part-timers. The connection between the publisher behind World Of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo has what could be described as an almost Rasputin-like grip on the affections of its players. Well, if relationship wasn’t so open and friendly.
The warmth of the connection that exists between Blizzard and its fans is made clear every single year that BlizzCon – the publisher’s annual fanfest – takes place in Anaheim California. Ahead of the doors opening on the Friday of that week, queues outside Anaheim’s convention centre circle the massive building. Fans clamour at the door, eager to attend panels, listen to announcements, get to grips with unreleased content for their Blizzard games of choice and – perhaps most important of all – connect with fellow players they share a common bond with. BlizzCon can be a place where people who have been friends online for years finally meet for the first time in person.
To outsiders, they’re easily dismissed as nerds, a badge most of them probably wear proudly. The reason Blizzard connects so utterly with its community, according to co-founder and Senior VP, Frank Pearce, is that the publisher is aware of its origins – the way sword, sorcery and sci-fi can bring people together. “I think what we do is beyond games, it’s connecting and gathering and sharing passions together,” says Pearce. “Back in the day it was dice and paper and people at a table and now it’s a virtual space but the sentiment is really the same.”
It may sound weird to compare the games of the most bankable publisher on the planet to a round of Dungeons & Dragons, but Blizzard’s success is likely due in part to the fact that there were more owners of twenty-sided dice than the world realised. The games Blizzard makes boast audiences the same size as country populations – by last count, Hearthstone, the publisher’s card-battle game, announced it had 50 million players and they consume new content at a voracious rate. So much so, that Blizzard’s business model – and by extension, BlizzCon – has changed somewhat in recent times. Over the last three years, Blizzard has doubled the number of IPs it has in the market and the content drop schedule for its various games has ballooned in size.
Since 2013, the publisher saw the release of Hearthstone, Heroes Of The Storm -a streamlined MOBA based on the rough rubric of Valve’s Dota- and a team-based asymmetrical FPS Overwatch. Barely a month goes by these days without Blizzard pumping out a new content for each of its games – whereas before its most recognised IPs, WoW, Diablo and Starcraft could lie fallow for a year or more.
Pearce says that the steady delivery of content key to keeping Blizzard’s community engaged, but that the developer also has to keep a careful eye not just on the mainstay faithful, but also the e-sports pros. Since e-sports a much bigger part of Blizzard’s business model, it has to make sure any new content in its games don’t adversely affect the players who depend on the publisher for their livelihoods. “They’re in the upper most of our mind, for sure,” says Pearce. “Using Overwatch as a particular example, the development team was thinking about e-sports, the pro-player experience and the viewer experience right from the start.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that every single game we make is going to have some competitive tournament, like the World Cup for Overwatch,” he says, “but I think that it’s important for us to contemplate what the viewership experiences is going to be like, because there are so many influencers out there in the community that are streaming on platforms like Twitch whose audiences like that experience. So it’s not necessarily about the competitive experience but instead it’s about the viewership experience. A game like Diablo, might not be a competitive esport but there might be some compelling experience for viewers.”
E-sports did take much of the centre stage at BlizzCon 2016; while the live audiences fluctuated in number during the knockout stages, you could barely find a seat for the finals and millions watched the world’s best compete online. The ‘Con also saw its fair share of announcements; alongside new content announced for most of the publisher’s games, Blizzard announced a partnership with Google’s DeepMind research firm involving Starcraft II to develop Artificial Intelligence. The aim is to create a non-scripted AI that can play the game the same way a human would and open up the potential for deep learning – an AI that can educate itself on the nuances of Starcraft II while playing. The initiative isn’t closed off to the public, either; early next year a patch will be released for the Real Time Strategy game that will allow developer, researchers and hobbyists to get involved. When one considers the history of Starcraft – a space Western that popularised esports and drove the digital infrastructure of South Korea after that country took the game into its collective heart – aiding AI research doesn’t seem like much a jump.
But Pearce is convinced it’s just the next step for both Starcraft and Blizzard. “From a development team perspective I’m convinced we have more to do,” he says. “Unlike World Of Warcraft, which has a pretty set business model with expansions and content, at some point we’re going to have to decide what’s next for the folks who work on Starcraft. But we want to put the pieces in place for when or if the team moves on that the community can take ownership of that space.”
Whether that’s AI development, shared user generated content or entire new gaming experiences – much like those that spawned the Dota games – Pearce says it’s difficult to know. But if history is anything to go by, it’s likely that even those games Blizzard stops supporting will find a new life due to the community. After all, Blizzard fans aren’t what you’d call part-timers.
Source: The Telegraph