Nice politics of Blizzard, 45 maps (as mininum 100 hours per map, top quality can take 500-1000 hours). Suppose about 7k hours spent on 45 maps. About 50 maps eliminated ~ +4500 hours. Totally about 12k hours of programmers. Free maps for arcade SC2. Imagine how much they should pay programmers inside Blizzard. They receive as minimum 5k$ per month(some of them may be 10k, one month 160 work hours.) 12k hours / 160 = 75 months. So cost of all these maps about 375 000$ - 750 000$. Nice work for free. And it's just work for several months. Total cost of all arcade maps for 5 years ~ several millions of $$$.(or even much more)
True, but that is the nature of any work. I still wonder how much money Blizzard ended up effectively flushing down the toilet when they cancelled Titan, or Starcraft: Ghost. As for the tech designers (the ones who use the editor and build the campaigns), yes, they probably make 50k a year or so. Mind you, for Blizzard to make all these maps would cost easily 3x as much, since they would actually do QA (most modders don't, they don't use testing frameworks, write unit tests, or do any automated testing at all, even I'm guilty of this).
Also remember that all maps and stuff are property of Blizzard Entertainment under the agreement, which was created by them. So even we are original creators of maps we can't even do anything. We are just giving our works for free.
Yes and no. Your are correct that you've signed away much of your ownership of the content to Blizzard. Doesn't remove the skills gained from doing these maps. And yes, the skills in doing mapmaking do translate to technical jobs, because the language and tool are more or less irrelvant for most of programming. I spend most of my work day reading code, drawing pictures, looking at specifications and flow diagrams, and asking people questions. I've written maybe.... 10 lines of code? in the last 2 months.
True, but that is the nature of any work. I still wonder how much money Blizzard ended up effectively flushing down the toilet when they cancelled Titan, or Starcraft: Ghost. As for the tech designers (the ones who use the editor and build the campaigns), yes, they probably make 50k a year or so. Mind you, for Blizzard to make all these maps would cost easily 3x as much, since they would actually do QA (most modders don't, they don't use testing frameworks, write unit tests, or do any automated testing at all, even I'm guilty of this).
Yes and no. Your are correct that you've signed away much of your ownership of the content to Blizzard. Doesn't remove the skills gained from doing these maps. And yes, the skills in doing mapmaking do translate to technical jobs, because the language and tool are more or less irrelvant for most of programming. I spend most of my work day reading code, drawing pictures, looking at specifications and flow diagrams, and asking people questions. I've written maybe.... 10 lines of code? in the last 2 months.