David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, and Max Schaefer created the original Diablo at Blizzard over 20 years ago, and during an interview with PC Gamer at Exilecon, Brevik contested a question about whether Blizzard has "sort of" changed recently.
"It's not 'sort of' changed, it has completely changed," he said, adding that senior art director Samwise Didier and senior vice president Allen Adham are the only original developers still there after all this time.
"The old Blizzard is gone," Max Schaefer added. "When we quit, there was like 180 employees total. There's thousands now. The whole empire is different, and Activision didn't have any influence. At that point it was just Blizzard and then some anonymous corporate owner, Vivendi or whoever. That was it. And so now [Blizzard is] a video game empire that has to appease shareholders and all that sort of stuff."
As for what's changed, Erich Schaefer said the following:
"I think the biggest thing is we didn't talk about shareholder value. We didn't talk about Chinese government and what they might want. The only thing we ever talked about was what we wanted to do and what the fans would like. It's obviously not the case anymore, for better or worse. I don't blame them. They're a giant corporation."
"You can't be that big and be as free-wheeling as we were, and one of the reasons we left was to be more self-deterministic and not be beholden to some monstrous organization," Max Schaefer adds.
"Nothing ever stays the same. We would not have survived [Blizzard's] growth in any form by staying there. It would have just driven us crazy because it's just all we want to do is have a team and make the games we want to make. That's possible in the small group like Blizzard used to be and it's not possible in a media conglomerate empire thing that they have right now."
Regarding the situation recently in which Blizzard attracted heat for their ban of Ng 'Blitzchung' Wai Chung, Max Schaefer added that "there was no clean way out. And I think they kind of bungled it, obviously, but there was no way they were getting through that without some controversy."
How do you feel Blizzard has changed?