It was developed by a small independent team within Blizzard who iterated like crazy and created prototypes with Adobe Flash. At one point they transferred basically the entire team to work on finishing StarCraft 2 temporarily and left the two principal game designers to continue iterating for 10 months.
Hearthstone ended up being a smash hit and their first properly new game since they released World of Warcraft. All because they gave a small creative team the freedom to explore those ideas.
How do you reconcile this belief with big tech companies being some of the largest bureaucracies on Earth, yet they continually build incredible and unique products?
> Amazon overall generated $24.8 billion in operating profits in 2021, and AWS was responsible for $18.5 billion (or 74%) of it. Basically, a business segment that contributes 14% of overall revenue is generating roughly three-quarters of Amazon's total operating profits.
* The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products.
* You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.