Project Lore

Austin GDC Panel Unveils Some Fun Facts About Blizzard

For those of you who don't follow every video game convention - shame on you! - you may be surprised to know that the Austin Game Developers Conference has been going on all this week.  The Austin festivities are generally lower key than the San Francisco show, because the Texas show tends to be more focused on developer aspects, and not announcements.  In conjunction with the more professional tone, rather than public relations, Austin happens to be a focal point of MMOG companies in the country.  This causes the show to lean in that direction more than any other.  Not a company to miss a beat, Blizzard sent Executive Vice President and Blizzard Co-Founder Frank Pearce and Production Director J. Allen Brack to the show.

In sticking with the more professional tone the pair didn't make any big announcements or tease any new Cataclysm information.  Pearce and Brack did give us some juicy information during the panel they presided over, The Universe Behind World of Warcraft.

TheGameReviews.com has a fantastic recap of all the juicy numbers here, but I'll highlight some of the more interesting topics.

World of Warcraft fun facts:
5,500,000 – Lines of code.  I wonder how long that would take to scroll through.
7650+ - Quests spread across WoW, TBC and WotLK
4,449,680,399 – Achievements earned since inception during Wrath's launch era.  The figure is already a few days old, making it outdated as soon as it was reported to the audience.
126 – Different versions issued of every patch.  Don't forget, they come in incremental upgrades, full upgrades, and streamed flavors for each of the 10 supported languages.
1.3 - Petabytes (1300 terabytes) of storage.
28,000+ - BlizzCon 2009 attendees.
0 - Blizzard employees got in to the show for free.  Despite each person paying their way, the company still operates the convention at a "substantial loss."
400 - Licensed Blizzard products including books, manga, plushies, apparel, and comics.
12,000,000+ – Battle.net accounts, a number that will only increase when Battle.net 2.0 is launched alongside StarCraft II and WoW players are forced to migrate.
400 - The number of employees before WoW launched, 60 of which were on the development team.
4600+ - The current number of Blizzard employees, including 2,584 customer service personal.
4 - Projects Blizzard is currently working on - Cataclysm, StarCraft II, Diablo III and the unannounced original intellectual property MMOG.

God I love numbers.

For those of you that are interested in game development, you can listen to the whole discussion here.  Needless to say, it's a lengthy chat.  If you don't find the above fun facts interesting, then passing on the mp3 would be a wise decision.