Any thoughts on this?
I just watched the credits for the first time after a poster here mentioned seeing Diablo in them. I couldn’t even get through the whole thing because:
- They were like 45 mins long
- They seriously listed every person who has ever worked for Activision INCLUDING the customer service phone reps I kid you not.
BUT the main thing I noted and that struck out to me aside from how odd it is to list your entire companies 5000+ people that work there but DIDN’T work on Diablo was…
The “Outsourced…Devs” titles.
Under Diablo workers still, there was a section that is for “Outsourced Weapons & Armor” etc
WTF is this.
Does that imply that they sent off stuff to be worked on by non blizzard employees?
Did they seriously outsource weapons and armor in this game?
Or is this a term in gaming dev that has some other meaning than the rest of the world uses outsourcing?
TLDR: Activision seriously included the entire company roster in Diablo 4 credits listing over 5000+ people even from over seas and phone reps and in that mess of a list that went on for 45 mins, they included the “outsourced artists” for Diablo 4.
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So, my friend does freelance work. There are websites where companies can buy individual assets that independant developers make. They use them as a baseline and usually edit them a little bit but its to save time. Its possible that is what those are.
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This is a very common practice in the IT world, particularly if you need additional help with something. Your other option is to hire more labor and then lay them off when the project ends. You need additional help, you don’t need it after the project is done, so you outsource work. This can happen with freelancers, employer to employee contracts, or employer to employer contracts. Which seems more fair from an employer standpoint to their employees? Immediately laying someone off when a project ends or hiring people who are only working on the one project and will move on afterwards?
For example, I work for a company that does Internet, everything to do with cloud computing, and has their own data center. A fortune 50 company needs help migrating on-prem data to AWS. They don’t have the resources to complete the project because the scale is massive. They don’t want to hire more people because they won’t need them after the migration completes in a few years. Therefore, they hired some of our employees to do the work. When the works done, we go back to another team, maybe this time it has to do with infrastructure maintenance, and do more work for our company, as we are permanent employees there.
It’s not like we’re unskilled or unable to do the work. In fact, we’re skilled and have a proven track record, so it makes hiring even easier, as we were hand picked from our employer to work for this company based on the needs of the company. It just makes sense that way.
I hope this example makes sense to you! It’s not a big deal.
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Outsourcing content is really common
There are certain studios whose main purpose is to make very particular set of content.
For example Titmouse did the Diablo 3 Cinematic
While the Illidian vs Arthas fight in WC3 Reforged
Was done by a 5 yr old learning Blender for their first time.
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Oh wow no way ty guys. Was unaware of all of this
outsourcing development help/QA testing help etc. is not uncommon… are you new? or just now reading credits in pretty much any game?
I hope you realize I was joking about the 5 yr old with blender
I was just making fun of the fact it was a terribly done cinematic that doesn’t match blizzard quality in the slightest.
If it were OG blizzard it never would have seen the light of day due to quality control.
On the otherhand Titmouse is an extremely famous studio that does a ton of game videos and their own TV show
One of their best is Amazon Production
Legend of Vox Machina
