World of Warcraft creator to announce video-game startup
Rob Pardo hopes Bonfire Studios will make games that allow players to create deeper social connections with each other
Big video games, like movies, are usually created by squadrons of people, including dozens or hundreds of artists and developers.
And yet it is an individual who often stands out for creative contributions to the most successful games. Within the games industry and among diehard players, they are admired in the way Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are is revered in Hollywood.
Rob Pardo earned a similar reputation during his 17-year career at Blizzard Entertainment, a game studio he left two years ago that has a rich legacy in the industry. Pardo was the lead designer on World of Warcraft, an online multiplayer fantasy game that came out 12 years ago and developed a following so passionate that players were willing to shell out $15 a month in subscription fees to kill orcs and goblins together.
Since its release, World of Warcraft has generated from $12 billion to $13 billion in revenue, estimates Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
“It is literally the singularly most successful game in history,” said John Riccitiello, former chief executive of Electronic Arts who now runs Unity Technologies, a game technology provider.
“There’s always a lot of hands-on success. I’ve been in the industry long enough to know that just about everybody credits him with the product,” he said about Pardo.
Pardo will have an opportunity to translate his success into a much smaller games startup. On Monday, he plans to announce the formation of a new company, Bonfire Studios, with a handful of game veterans.
Pardo, chief executive of Bonfire, recently raised $25 million in funding for the company from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and from Riot Games, a game studio owned by the Chinese internet giant Tencent that makes League of Legends, one of the most popular online games in the world. Riccitiello and others invested in Bonfire in an earlier round.
Based in Irvine, Calif., Bonfire does not have a game in development yet. Pardo, 46, says it is safe to assume the company will make online multiplayer games, though he has not yet decided whether it will create them for mobile devices, PCs or both.
“We have a lot of confidence they’re going to build something fantastic,” said Brandon Beck, chief executive and co-founder of Riot Games. “They’re pretty uncompromising when it comes to quality.”
For now, Pardo says he is focused on hiring people to begin generating ideas and making game prototypes. Min Kim, a former executive with Nexon, an Asian game developer, and several former Blizzard colleagues joined him as Bonfire’s founding team. He wants Bonfire’s games to re-create the social connections many players formed when banding together in clans in World of Warcraft, a game that allows players to fraternize with one another online.
“We don’t want to be constrained by genre,” Pardo said. “We really want to create games that help us make those deeper connections with each other.”
After leaving Blizzard, Pardo spent time designing another project, a custom home he lives in with his family in Irvine. There are side-byside men’s and women’s bathrooms labelled Horde and Alliance, after the two character factions in World of Warcraft, and wooden floors inlaid with Tetris blocks.
Pardo said his inspiration for a startup with a small development team occurred during the making of Blizzard’s Hearthstone, a digital card game that was a huge hit. At Blizzard, most game development teams were so large that some of the greatest challenges for Pardo, Blizzard’s former chief creative officer, were management-oriented.
The original team that created Hearthstone was unorthodox by Blizzard standards, consisting of a little over a dozen people. That relatively small size eliminated management layers that could make communication difficult and make some employees feel as if they did not have a stake in the project, Pardo said.
“Everyone got to be completely involved in game design,” he said. “I feel like that team’s culture was one of the strongest.”
Small game studios have produced some of the industry’s most remarkable successes in recent years. During his break from Blizzard, Pardo consulted with Riccitiello at Unity — through which Pardo was able to travel the world as a kind of goodwill ambassador for the company, meeting with game developers, including Supercell, the Finnish mobile games startup behind Clash of Clans.
Blizzard has preserved a reputation for maintaining creative independence while being part of a larger game publisher, Activision Blizzard, which has been known to kill games in development when they fall short of its standards, rather than risk tarnishing its brand. And fans flock to Blizzard Entertainment’s annual convention, BlizzCon.
“They’re in many ways the Pixar of gaming, or at least the Pixar of five years ago,” said Geoff Keighley, creator of the Game Awards, an Oscarslike ceremony for the industry.
“The great thing about Rob is he’s a bit of a polymath. He’s done a lot of different styles of games at Blizzard,” Keighley added.
Other star game designers have left big companies before and failed to match or exceed their previous success. Although there are creative challenges to working in large game companies, they do have advantages in their promotional capacity and technological tools. Pardo’s supporters are not concerned.
“If you could basically draft Kevin Durant and invest in Kevin Durant as an NBA player, you’d be an idiot not to,” Riccitiello said.