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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Video games are one part idea and three parts implementation.

And the talent at Blizzard has no lack of good ideas.

More like one part idea and 9,999 parts implementation.

Nearly all raw ideas are unworkable. It takes considerable engineering to turn it into a workable idea, before implementing it.

For example, the idea of running current through a wire to heat it up till it glows, and voila! You've invented the electric light!

No, you haven't. You'll need to determine:

1. wire size

2. wire composition

3. how much voltage to apply

4. how much current

5. how to keep the wire from melting and burning up

6. how to supply voltage and current

7. how to keep the filament for setting nearby things afire

8. what kind of fixture to put the wire in

9. how to manufacture it for a reasonable cost

10. how to manufacture it in quantity

and probably a number of other things, too.

That... seems optimistic about the state of the modern average engineer at Blizzard. Which isn't to say that folks are bad at their jobs, but it's not as if it's a company that's done well-received and breakthrough modern game design in the last 5 years.

If anything, the folks who made the company what it was either were the people being protested or left 5-10 years ago, or both.

This ignores how Blizzard works. They operate on glacial time scales. They released, Overwatch five years ago, which was fantastic. They haven’t released any new games since then.

There's been a noted downward trend though. See the sc2 expansions and the remastered games.

My first thought was that can't be right, but the only noteworthy thing was overwatch in 2016.

I don't have high hopes for Diablo 4, though I'll probably end up buying it anyway...

One part idea? I've been told that "ideas are essentially worthless" for the 20 years I've been developing software. What changed?

I’d say in most cases they are useless by themselves. An old idea implemented in a superior way (or, as EA knows well, with slightly shinier graphics) can still be a huge success.

An amazing idea but with no or a bad implementation is worthless to you.

they have trade marks like skeleton king, even other big companies like valve bow down to blizzard

Yep, so I wouldn't suggest a potential competitor try to make a game about skeleton kings.

... Minecraft, on the other hand, was an adequate idea (and not even original to Notch) doggedly implemented over years of iteration.

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