Blizzard Drops World of Warcraft Stat Bomb

Blizzard Entertainment's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce detailed the history and rise of World of Warcraft during a presentation at GDC Austin. Gamasutra reports that the World of Warcraft team (then a splinter off of the Warcraft III team) worked on a squad-based RPG called Nomad (eventually cancelled) before shifting their focus to the MMO.

There are roughly 30 department leads for World of Warcraft, with each team composed of 5 – 8 people. The programing team has written 5.5 million lines of code, the art department has created 1.5 million assets and the production department has managed 33,000 tasks.

The design department, responsible for everything from the classes, events and professions, has created some 70,000 spells and some 40,000 NPCs. The cinematics department (responsible for everything from official machinima to pre-rendered movies) is comprised of 123 people, while the in house sound department has created 27 hours of music. A platform services group (dealing with QA, localization and Mac development) have helped test the 7,650 quests in the game and squashed roughly 180,000 bugs since the game launched.

The localization department has translated World of Warcraft into 10 different languages, all of which are complete translations, and tracks  360,000 text strings and some 2 million words on an ongoing basis. Tech services helps gets patches to players; v3.1 moved 4.7 petabytes of data and given the languages supported and QA required makes support a Herculean task. The Blizzard Online Network services group of 68 people monitors over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM from the U.S. to South Korea and Germany. A customer support staff of 2,056 game masters and 340 billing managers work tirelessly on all regions of the globe. Online Services team, which also handles the 12,000,000 Battle.net accounts, looks to completely integrate with the World of Warcraft community.

The Web team manages websites, online stores and the WoW Armory; in total some 900,000 web files. The corporate applications group helps manage internal data and protect it from malicious software, telling the designers what players like, like rewards, of which users have unlocked nearly 4.5 billion. The PR and comunity team have helped produce the 10,000 articles written on the game while the eSports group has helped host almost 1,640 events. The marketing department have produced the commercials that have been viewed over 10 million times and the licensing group have helped to release 400 products with Blizzard properties. The creative development team helps catalog the company's history, working with writers and artist to maintain 100,000 art assets. All of the department's of the company are on occasion tapped to test and be impartial about new changes to World of Warcraft.

Blizzard utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4,600 people to operate World of Warcraft.  Pearce notes that the game has changed the way the developer is organized and that the the game couldn't be done without the departments mentioned.

The reasons listed above are just another example of why we think competing with World of Warcraft is foolish.