So I’ve been playing StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

Once upon a time in a universe resembling this one at a younger stage, I dreamt of game programming. I don’t think that there’s any coder of my generation that didn’t have similar aspirations – perhaps getting published in Compute! magazine, perhaps getting one’s name on the box, or maybe even just writing a really cool game. I stand with the majority of developers who have never done that sort of thing. Times changed.

Consider what the person who wrote Galactic Adventures and Galactic Gladiators had written on the Well (apparently before they thought of putting a name to it):

To me, the most amazing thing about doing these games (and I’m about to date myself) is that I did virtually everything myself. I designed the games, programmed them, drew the graphics (quite primitive), wrote the rule book I did get help from friends and people at SSI in testing and making suggestions. Compare that with today where new games are developed with a million dollar budget and use teams of 30 or more people, programmers, artists, tests, story consultants, etc, etc. And you know what — the games of today are better (Gee, why is that a surprise?)

With that in mind and considering that I knew about Blizzard when the original Warcraft was a freeware game where you paid a bit more to get a full version – no, not the MMORPG you kids play now, but the Warcraft that started a new genre that Starcraft continues – Blizzard has come a long way. Since then, Battle.Net has come online. Since then, numerous titles have come through Blizzard and, while I haven’t played Diablo or messed with World of Warcraft, not one title hasn’t been popular. Blizzard has a kind of magic that works for them. I just like a particular genre and have found MMORPGs to be disappointments when it comes to content; I dislike leveling a character by what is properly termed grinding.

All of that said, I’m sure the budget for the Heart of the Swarm expansion was over a million dollars. I’d wager that it was at least 10 times that amount. The detail is great, the storyline is good (though how a prisoner in a high security prison has a pistol escapes me) and it’s playworthy – though I keep mixing up Q and A on the keyboard. But here’s the thing: I played through the game that took so long to develop in about 8 hours of game time. Hard difficulty, much the same. Brutal – well, that’s still in progress. There’s always the PvP maps and the challenge maps. I figure that, all things considered, the game will last me well over 1,000 hours of playtime.

It sold 1.1 million copies in 48 hours. At $40 per expansion, that’s $40.4 million in 48 hours.

Yeah, we’ve come a long way from typing in games from magazines. We’ve come a long way from a single developer writing a game. There was a magic to that era, though – we didn’t yet expect a great game. We expected a game and hoped it would be good. Now people get their sodden underwear twisted when they start talking about game balance and other things on the forums. As a fuddy-duddy, I see that as an odd form of entitlement – people expect a lot more for $40 and have the privilege of time to gripe about it in poor writing.

Game development has come a long way. Humanity? Not so much.

Thank you, Blizzard, for what I consider to be another great game. As a developer, I wish I had a hand in it. I’ll wait for the Protoss section. Take your time.