Blizzard: 80% of effort for 20% of polish

By Oli Welsh Published 11 March, 2010

So that's why they take so long.

Blizzard senior engineer Dominic Fillion revealed the extent of the developer's perfectionism at GDC today. During a presentation on programming StarCraft II, he quipped that the vast majority of the developer's effort goes into the final polishing stages of the game.

"They say that the last 20 per cent of your effort gets you 80 per cent of your game," Fillion said, quoting the the common game development maxim.

"With us it seems to be the other way around. 80 per cent of our effort goes into the final 20 per cent of polish."

Fillion was almost certainly exaggerating for effect, but his talk - titled 'Designing for Performance, Scalability and Reliability: StarCraft II's apprach' - went on to showcase Blizzard's legendary attention to detail.

It was mostly a technical talk detailing the tricks Fillion's team uses to ensure that StarCraft II will run smoothly on a broad range of computers. He also showed how Blizzard, unimpressed with the third-party tools available, had built its own tools suite with a wide range of features.

One readout allowed designers without technical expertise to quickly view which components of the game were consuming the most processing power and causing slowdown at any given time, listed by company department - and so see immediately which colleague they needed to speak to about it.

Fillion could also automatically trigger AI-driven StarCraft II battles ranging from light to heavy demands on processing power, typing a single word to summon half a dozen of every single unit in the game in a huge scrap. It ran at 8 frames per second on his $1000 laptop. "I'm OK with that," he said.

StarCraft II is currently in beta testing, and is due out in the first half of this year.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (21) Latest comment 2 years ago

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  • Bennicus #1 2 years ago

    "They say that the last 20 per cent of your effort gets you 80 per cent of your game"
    I've never heard this in game development, the one I always get is the 90-90 rule: "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time"

  • woodnotes #2 2 years ago

    It's called Pareto's Law, Blizzard. Welcome to 1906.

  • CaptainFantasm #3 2 years ago

    @woodnotes

    Just taught me more than I've learnt at uni all week.

  • zedzee #4 2 years ago

    I don't suppose Blizzard have any plans for releasing their in-house developed...err...development software publicly, so that I can tell which of my f*cking work colleagues are the laziest bastards, so I can tell them to get off their arses of f*ck off?!!!

  • Fightclubber #5 2 years ago

    All that polish for a game that looks like any other CaC type game. Fuck me Supreme commander looks more refined complex and creative than this turd.

    But hey thats Blizzard, doing the same old shit since 1990

  • Fleisch #6 2 years ago

    Yeah 80/20 is and old rule and by its very definition works both ways, blizzard arent special!!! ell they are...but not in that 80/20 20/80 way.

  • Mattnik #7 2 years ago

    "All that polish for a game that looks like any other CaC type game. Fuck me Supreme commander looks more refined complex and creative than this turd.

    But hey thats Blizzard, doing the same old shit since 1990"

    *sigh*

  • john_silence #8 2 years ago

    Fillion? Man, he's one letter away from being the Prime Minister of France. Then we Frenchmen would become a powerful Starcraft army of monstrous frog-like beasts! Fillion for president, I say!

  • Shikasama #9 2 years ago

    I get the message behind what he is saying but if that was my company and 80% of the effort of my employees was going into 20% of the product I'd consider that horribly inefficient.

  • Murton #10 2 years ago

    This totally depends on who he's talking about. If he is talking about just the studio then it's right that the last 20 will give you 80 because the engine and assets take so much effort but account for so little of the total product. If he means Blizzard as a whole then we're talking testing, bugfixing. localisation, etc. things that only happen on any real scale during the final 6 months of the project and really shift the balance in the other direction.

    Blizzard are a talented developer, no doubt there, but they do tend to think that they're a lot more special than they really are.

  • sarcasmoidosis #11 2 years ago

    I await for the day their "do whatever the hell you like" contract they had with Vivendi expires and Activision finally gets their hands on Blizzard. Starcraft 3, Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft: Rock Band in 2012 ;)

  • TitusCrow #12 2 years ago

    Sculpting! now this principle really holds true here. You can get rather obsessed with detail in anything I think. Blizzard always produce the goods though. Maybe it would be better if we only got 8 big games a year but they were all classics than 100's of inter changeable titles. All looking similar and then patched to crap after release, as we paying beta testers do the job of a longer dev cycle.
    Or maybe as an older gamer I have become jaded to anything bellow classic.. *shrugs*

  • FooAtari #13 2 years ago

    I don't care what Blizzards development process is like. I just wish more developers used it.... Give me a highly polished game over yearly releases every god damn time.

    I couldn't give a toss about the next CoD game, been there, done that too many times. Throughly sick of that game. But the next Diablo has me really excited... Why? well it's been ten years since the last Diablo...

    I don't need a release date, just quietly work on your game and release when it's ready to be released. The advent of on-line functionality of consoles has made day 1 patches way to common. Games are buggy and incomplete on release....

    @sarcasmoidosis
    .I await for the day their "do whatever the hell you like" contract they had with Vivendi expires and Activision finally gets their hands on Blizzard. Starcraft 3, Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft: Rock Band in 2012 ;)

    I don't think that will ever happen. Notice how the company is now called Activision Blizzard (not Activision Infinity Ward, or Activison Blizzard Infinity Ward). Blizzard are clearly treated a lot differently to ever other developer...

  • Kerome #14 2 years ago

    Interesting to see that Blizzard is just as subject to NIH as the rest of the development community.

    Still, have to give them credit for setting a low hardware bar on their product, and still making it look good and run smoothly. There are lots of developers who get sidetracked by teh sexeh tech and write SSAO shaders which just crawl on anything that isn't NVidia or ATI's latest and greatest, and write rubbish low-lod shaders which look awful on low-end platforms.

    [wanders off looking for the presentation slides]
    Edited by 1 at 12/03/10 @ 09:01

  • dingo75 #15 2 years ago


    Fillion? Man, he's one letter away from being the Prime Minister of France. Then we Frenchmen would become a powerful Starcraft army of monstrous frog-like beasts! Fillion for president, I say!

    Actually you would only know one command "Surrender". ;)

  • Boom #16 2 years ago

    While I am a huge fan of Blizzard's products, however, despite the obvious complexities of making software operate on multiple unique PC platforms, that statement makes a mockery of efficient development strategy for any kind of product manufacturing where QA and testing should be considered every step of the way and not considered as part of the end product.

    Most companies can't afford to consistently revisit its core or 3rd party components when in the final stages of product delivery. Blizzard are in a unique market space because of their past-history and proprietary tech, thus efficiency may be deemed by them to be a lower priority to the production of a high-end quality end-product which differentiates a Blizzard product from the rest of the market. Nevertheless, I can't advocate this 80/20 strategy unless you have deep pockets/strong-backing from shareholders/VC, or your company exists in a space that identifies itself by the high-end quality as a hallmark of its unique value.

  • Kremlik Verified Co-Founder, Crash To Desktop #17 2 years ago

    StarCraft II is currently in beta testing, and is due out in the first half of this year.

    Was the whole article about 'effort' and then EG state that at the end? Being in CLOSED beta doesn't exactally mean it's close to release, Blizzard want SC2 to be perfect enough to squash all it's ravils and be top dog for at least a year.

    I very much dought Blizzard will push the game out unbalnaced and half the Battlenet features fully tested just for a suspected Q2 release, Battlenet on it's own is their puppy, like I said releasing anything that big half done isn't going to happen any time soon.

    As Blizzard say 'it's done when it's done'

  • geeza2020 #18 2 years ago

    the only game on the horizon which has any chance of making blizzard actually realise they are not as special as they think is Star Wars: The Old Republic. I bet when blizzard heard who was making this they absolutely shit themselves.

  • Quak #19 2 years ago

    Sorry to be pedantic, but what he says isn't the other way round at all. 20% of effort gets 80% of the game in both examples - whether it's 20% getting you the first 80% of a game or 80% effort getting you the last 20% of a game. They're exactly the same thing.

    The rule we go by is that the last 10% of a product takes 90% of your time.
    Edited by 2 at 12/03/10 @ 11:26

  • Acrid #20 2 years ago

    Quote
    " 'Designing for Performance, Scalability and Reliability: StarCraft II's apprach' - went on to showcase Blizzard's legendary attention to detail."

    Did they not have any tips for Eurogamers attention to detail?

  • Kovacs77 #21 2 years ago

    Man, I'd be pissed if I was the one in five of Polish gamers that Blizzard couldn't be bothered giving 100% effort to.




    I've not read the article