To my friends, colleagues in the Hearthstone community,
After 15 years at Blizzard and almost 10 years at Hearthstone, I made the incredibly difficult decision to take on a new journey.
Man, that was a hard sentence to type on a machine.
It was 20 years ago when it started here. My first role was “Night Crew Game Tester”.
Since then, Blizzard has been good to me. I have to project sporting events, promote BlizzCons, play in rock bands, record rap and work with amazing people. But the biggest opportunity came in 2008 when I came to “Team 5”. The Hearthstone team.
I’m very proud of Hearthstone. I think we have had an impact on the industry. People tell me that Hearthstone is more united with his family, or that he made many friends with the people he met at a Fireside meeting. Others tell me they were inspired by Hearthstone to become game developers. It’s great to be a part of something that touches so many people.
But despite how proud I am of Hearthstone, I am still more proud of the team.
There is no team like the Hearthstone team. People have come and gone in the 10 years that Hearthstone has been under development, but there is something special about the team’s soul. We know our main product was not the game, but the team in it. A good team can do great things and I think the Hearthstone team is the best. It’s not just a job. It is a shared passion. We get started on the work and focus on the game we like and try to improve it every day.
We often review Hearthstone subreddit for opportunities to improve the game. I have been fascinated by all the memes, participated in animated debates or simply been responsible for our high standards shared for the game. We intend to be very accessible on social media and I think our team helped go further in this sense. It has been especially gratifying for me to see that the team has taken a step forward in recent years and has helped me participate in these forms to the extent that I focus more on direction and less on real design.
It takes too much protagonism to be a public face, but the more than 80 people on the development team are still there, and they are the ones actually making the maps, the games, the events, the missions, and the features. I’m sure the game is in the best possible hands and I’m excited to see how a new generation of leaders come to Hearthstone from here.
I’m very excited to be able to take a crazy risk right now in my life and I’m emotionally charged and a little sad at the moment. I want to help you start a new business. We’ll probably make games, but we have not discovered more. I want to design, program and create things again. I want to open Starbucks on campus. Curse.
Blizzard, thank you for arriving with me, and thank you for arriving with Hearthstone. I can not wait to see what happens now.
And there is the passionate community of players, they will at least laugh, the risas that we share together. Thank you for being a part of Hearthstone is so much fun for me. I loved every minute.
Ben Brode
