It is a special kind of thrill, because games are one of the last places in programming where things are still very intricate and you have to custom do most of the stuff yourself (Raw C/C coding, optimizations all over, large application of theoretical CS problems, some very hard, massively complex, etc.).
As for wanting to join Blizzard, you can say the same of every company, depending on your point of view. Also, there simply becomes a manpower point where no matter how good your idea is, you need additional help to make it a reality.
As for Blizzard being lazy... sorry no, they are not. Welcome to the real world, where you MUST talk to people and coordinate things, and can't just go YOLO on your own project. You can get away with that when you are flying solo, but you are discounting a half dozen things that once you are in a team environment, just flat out do not work. Modern software and engineering can only be done as a team effort, no one here is skilled enough or have enough time to implement everything by themself.
Now you can make the argument that they may too much bureaucracy, but their hiring page would indicate more of a manpower shortage then anything. Also, a basic truism of software is that a new employee is basically worthless for the first 3-6 months.
Coming back to the topic at hand. Discounting the improvements made for Storm is somewhat naive, the engine team exists to make the engine for the Blizzard teams first, us second. In no universe would that ever be reversed. The only time I would see that occurring is Blizzard somehow decided they wanted to compete with unity and co head on for sales and was selling their engine (Afaik, Unreal allows you to purchase the source code for a decent sum, don't know about Unity, Source 2 is unknown in terms of source code).
Could Renee be hired to oversee a project of this magnitude? Unlikely, she would have to do many things that would not necessarily be palatable. For starters, immigrate to the US. May not be possible, US immigration is a fun thing that deserves its own discussion. Second. even if she were to start today, we wouldn't see anything for months (see above about new employee). This is the largest barrier for most people, they are unwilling or unable to move to Irvine (or Southern California in general) to work at Blizzard.
Third, everyone somehow thinks Blizzard, because of WoW, has cash to burn. They don't, very few business do, mostly high tech Silicon Valley and Wall St. (ignoring the classic oligarchies in other countries). So doing this project, you would need to show a decent business case for it. As you mentioned, RTS are stagnant. This is mostly due to cost. The upfront cost to develop a singleplayer campaign is immense, with a quite possibly negative ROI. IT has been said that single player RTS is more or less dead for this reason.
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It is a special kind of thrill, because games are one of the last places in programming where things are still very intricate and you have to custom do most of the stuff yourself (Raw C/C coding, optimizations all over, large application of theoretical CS problems, some very hard, massively complex, etc.).
As for wanting to join Blizzard, you can say the same of every company, depending on your point of view. Also, there simply becomes a manpower point where no matter how good your idea is, you need additional help to make it a reality.
As for Blizzard being lazy... sorry no, they are not. Welcome to the real world, where you MUST talk to people and coordinate things, and can't just go YOLO on your own project. You can get away with that when you are flying solo, but you are discounting a half dozen things that once you are in a team environment, just flat out do not work. Modern software and engineering can only be done as a team effort, no one here is skilled enough or have enough time to implement everything by themself.
Now you can make the argument that they may too much bureaucracy, but their hiring page would indicate more of a manpower shortage then anything. Also, a basic truism of software is that a new employee is basically worthless for the first 3-6 months.
Coming back to the topic at hand. Discounting the improvements made for Storm is somewhat naive, the engine team exists to make the engine for the Blizzard teams first, us second. In no universe would that ever be reversed. The only time I would see that occurring is Blizzard somehow decided they wanted to compete with unity and co head on for sales and was selling their engine (Afaik, Unreal allows you to purchase the source code for a decent sum, don't know about Unity, Source 2 is unknown in terms of source code).
Could Renee be hired to oversee a project of this magnitude? Unlikely, she would have to do many things that would not necessarily be palatable. For starters, immigrate to the US. May not be possible, US immigration is a fun thing that deserves its own discussion. Second. even if she were to start today, we wouldn't see anything for months (see above about new employee). This is the largest barrier for most people, they are unwilling or unable to move to Irvine (or Southern California in general) to work at Blizzard.
Third, everyone somehow thinks Blizzard, because of WoW, has cash to burn. They don't, very few business do, mostly high tech Silicon Valley and Wall St. (ignoring the classic oligarchies in other countries). So doing this project, you would need to show a decent business case for it. As you mentioned, RTS are stagnant. This is mostly due to cost. The upfront cost to develop a singleplayer campaign is immense, with a quite possibly negative ROI. IT has been said that single player RTS is more or less dead for this reason.