Pearce: Blizz has "room for improvement"

Blizzard still has "a lot of work to do" in order to come to terms with its enormous growth since World of Warcraft launched.

"It's a constant struggle every day to make sure we're doing the right things with the organisation," senior vice president and co-founder Frank Pearce told Eurogamer this week.

"I don't think our on-boarding process is very smooth at all, especially considering our size and what we're trying to achieve. We have lots of room for improvement.

"From the outside looking in, if you look at the end result in our products, we're doing OK, but it's a constant risk when you've experienced that much explosive growth in the last five years. It's a lot of work."

Pearce said that "a documented mission statement and core values" were helpful in keeping growing pains in check.

Blizzard was already a big company, of course, but the scale of its growth has been challenging for Pearce and colleagues to handle.

"Even when we had 500 people, it's very difficult to know who everyone was, and now we've got 4600 people, you just can't know who everyone is," he said. "There are many more people that you don't know than you do.

"On the development teams, they're very much like family. They know everyone on their team and they work together day in and day out.

"They have very distinct cultures, because there's the WOW team, and there's the StarCraft II team and the Diablo team. But we don't have that sense of small team and family as an organisation any more.

"And it's OK, right? We made great games to get into the hands of our fans, and this is a side effect of that."

Check out our in-depth hands-on preview of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty for more on Blizzard's latest, which is due out on 27th July.

For more on Blizzard itself, check out The Making of World of Warcraft.