???
Did you even read what I said? I literally just explained what a timesheet was. It has nothing to do with choosing what you work on. Boss tells you work on project A so you do that, and then you enter that in your timesheet, etc.
No, you LITERALLY said that in the opening post:
The $20 indie steam game you worked on is in no way comparable to a subscription game with multiple large yearly content patches made by a large multinational corporation.
Yes, and unlike EVERY GAME YOU HAVE EVER WORKED ON, the WoW team’s artists 1.) constantly have new content to be working on due to the patch/expansion cycle there is no downtime; and 2.)a budget that is applied on a timed basis, not a per game basis as a result of working on a subscription game. Neither you nor Carhagen seem to understand how different Blizzard is from the actual literal small indie companies you worked with.
You have literally no idea how this works on a company the scale of Blizzard’s and it shows. You’re claiming that subscription money goes to upkeep when paying upkeep for servers is such an astonishingly minute portion of an online game’s budget. WoW is immensely profitable; the only reason Blizzard puts things on the cash shop is because executives decided it will make them even more money to do so.
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So about this not picking projects you just said .
OK, give us your ballpark at the total cost.
And please spare us trying to pretend the problem is we’re too dumb to understand how it works. I no more believed that a single artist ships an item all by themselves than you believe games are made entirely by artists (I hope.) I’m someone who has managed large teams with large budgets, and I get the sense I’m not the only one in this thread.
Why do you conveniently leave out my edit where I explained what I meant? You’re just being disingenuous and I’m wasting my time.
Bit bigger than that. Granted, nowhere near WoW level, but it works the same way.
You can’t possibly know that. Even some AAA games I worked on had downtime.
You’re making a lot of incorrect assumptions.
Obviously. Without money, they can’t pay people. Without paying people, they can’t make games. People need to stop acting like Blizzard is this evil corporation because they want to make a profit. You think their employees never get a raise when things are going well? They’re not using all that money to line their pockets.
BUT they DO have to recoup the costs of making those store items, because they’re basically DLC, meaning they’re not part of the game’s budget. Why do you think games on kickstarter have set goals with rewards like “entire new zone” and “pvp mode”? Because all that extra stuff costs money. The same is true in a big game company, if you didn’t allocate budget for something, you can’t just take money from somewhere else. You either budget for it or you leave it out. OR you release it as DLC and people buy it.
Reading comprehension. I’m talking about timesheets. Meaning you have to pick the right project in the dropdown when you’re doing your timesheet.
Uh huh ok .
https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-12-activision-blizzard-layoffs-800-employees-record-2018.html
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I couldn’t tell you because I don’t work for Blizzard and I don’t know how much their artists are paid or how many they assign to each project, but let’s say they make on average $30 an hour. If we’re talking about a mount, they have to pay someone to design it, which probably means a few days of work, then they need probably a couple modelers, and that varies depending on if they’re making it from scratch or modifying an existing model, but let’s say a week, then it needs to be unwrapped, textured, rigged, skinned, animated, etc. There’s tools that make unwrapping and rigging faster, and animation is often recycled from other models, but texturing can take several days because there’s several different maps to make, and usually they assign several people to it. It’s really rare that an artist working for a big company will do several different things - they usually do one part of the process then pass it to someone else. Feel free to do the math, but it probably won’t be accurate because I’m speaking from what I know and Blizzard’s teams are probably a lot bigger than what I’m used to.
This thread is starting to make me feel paranoid that I’ll somehow accidentally break NDA, lol.
I don’t know what to tell you. You misread what I said and I explained.
I did respond to your edit; you claimed that it wasn’t helping them directly, but rather by giving them “something to do” as DLC during downtime to keep them on. I responded directly by showing that there isn’t downtime, as they are constantly producing DLC in the form of patches and expansions.
Bolded part is important because it invalidates what comes after the comma. Do you think before you post?
I don’t know where the interview went, but there is literally no downtime for them. They have multiple teams leapfrogging and as soon as you finish your current project you’re on to what your team is at next. They work expansions in advance.
You’re making a lot of incorrect generalized statements. Additionally, it’s not an assumption- by your own admission you haven’t ever worked on anything near WoW’s scope.
They get bonuses in “honor points,” or company store currency, as evidenced by the fiasco a few months ago. This is also getting back to the point that you said that you corrected: are artists benefiting from the sales or are they not? You have now both denied and affirmed it in the very same post. Additionally, you also seem to be suggesting workers derive the full value of their labor in a capitalist society? Get real.
Furthermore, the entire critique here isn’t even being levied at artists and you are just so close to understanding that with this post. The people that are being critiqued when posters hate on the addition of the transmog set are not the artists, but these very same suits who are choosing an increased profit margin over including all of the assets that they make in a SUBSCRIPTION GAME.
This section hammers in the point of how completely out of touch you are with Blizzard’s setup. Do you know why kickstarter and the other games you worked on had to do it like that? Because they are not sitting on vast reserves of past profit and even more money coming in every single day from the subscriptions to a game they already made. Also, I don’t know why you keep screaming DLC! DLC! as if it justifies paying MORE than we already are, when we pay a monthly subscription for that DLC. It’s called patch content. When Blizzard makes something to sell us that is identical to what we’re paying for but still an extra charge outside of what we’re paying for, it makes people feel shafted. That’s the entire point here; we are already paying for it and they are wanting to charge us again.
I can’t link, but just look up the size of WoW’s budget. The game makes BILLIONS per year in subscriptions. They can afford to both give artists raises and not charge extra for the same thing we’re already paying for. They’ve got enough.
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Not sure what you mean by interview, but even if they work on stuff in advance doesn’t mean there’s no downtime. Animators can’t work until models are ready, modelers can’t work until designs are ready, etc. You can’t know that everything always aligns perfectly and that no one ever has any downtime. I can tell you from experience that a lot of unforeseen stuff happens when working on games and it makes it so there IS downtime, even when there shouldn’t be.
I have not. Companies that make more profits can pay their employees more, and side projects allow artists to work and not get cut, but I never said that the sales benefited the artists directly.
You seem to have missed the main point of my post, which was that a lot of people take a dump on every single item that gets added to the store instead of complaining about the system directly. There’s literally zero reason to call the items “gross” or “garbage” just because they don’t agree that they’re being sold on the store. AND again, the subscription fee DOES NOT cover store items because they’re not part of the main budget. How many times do I have to say this? Sure, it would be great if the game’s budget allowed for items like this to be in the main game, but if it doesn’t, they HAVE to sell them to make their money back.
But you’re NOT paying for it! You’re paying for the game and then the sub is for access to the servers. Like I said in a previous post, say you buy Resident Evil 2 on Steam. Then you can buy costumes as DLC. Why were they not just part of the main game? Because they weren’t in the budget. They’re extra. So they’re selling them as extra. If you don’t want them, don’t buy them. It boggles my mind that people are so angry about the Blizzard store but not DLCs for other games, because they’re THE SAME THING. You say I don’t have experience to speak about Blizzard, but I can tell you that DLC is made WAY after the art part of a game is done, when there’s downtime and artists need something to work on.
I don’t know why everyone is being so hostile. But I guess I should have expected it when I made a thread “defending Blizzard” on the forums.
Yeah, I’m sure blizzard is really struggling for cash right now. Small indie devs.
I’m talking about the budget for the project, not Blizzard’s bank account.
It kinda depends on the size of the company. Our budgets NEVER were assigned to “Projects”, they were assigned to “Departments”. Our Individual departments never had to fill out timesheets as their time was 100% dedicated to that specific department.
For example, the team I managed had about 30 people on it. Their fully loaded costs were about $75K per year each. Everything we did went under the heading of our one sub department. Again, no individual accounting required.
FYI - this was a Fortune 25 company with 10s of thousands of employees and a lot more subcontractors and affiliates around the world.
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^
This is how the vast majority of society works
Even down to the lowly burger flipper
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I have no clue what a Fortune 25 company is, but yeah, I’m not saying every company is like that, but every game company I’ve worked for has had a separate budget for each project, because each project has different assets that need to be made.
Budgets can’t be assigned to departments directly because every department works together on the projects. For example, Game X will have a budget, and within that budget, there’s gonna be money allocated to the art department, the QA department, the sound department, etc. but it remains on a project basis, if that makes sense.
Think of Fortune 25 companies as the top 25 companies around
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Thanks, had never heard that term before.
no excuse for any transmog to be on ingame store while class tier sets don’t exist, it’s that plain and simple
also i have my warrior running around in it, so why can’t i transmog as cloth as a warrior again, can anyone tell me?