Blizzard Talks About the Universe Behind World of Warcraft aka 13,250 Server Blades
by Gino Thursday, September 17 2009 @ 03:29 PM CDT

Thursday's keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference was given by Frank Pearce and J. Allen Brack. Pearce is the Executive Vice President of Blizzard, and Brack is the Production Director. They discussed the universe behind World of Warcraft and how they entertain the 12 million people who play the game.

The Austin GDC keynote is geared more towards game developers and industry people than the general game public. During the keynote Pearce spoke on what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running. They also revealed their total team size:

• Game Design: 37
• Cinematics: 123
• Platform Services: 245
• Quality Assurance: 218
• International Offices Population: 1,724
• Game Masters: 2,056
• Billing: 240
• Quality Control: 67
• Technical Support: 121
• Online Technologies: 149

According to data presented at the keynote, Patch 3.1 delivered more than 4.7 Petabytes of data. That's 4,700 terabytes, or 4,700,000 gigabytes. For comparison, Facebook has around 1.5 Petabytes of data, AT&T had 16 Petabytes transferred through their network each day in 2008.

Though many in the community are quick to downplay WoW, it currently holds the high ground in the MMO market. Though Bioware has not yet made the mistake of claiming SWTOR to be the "WoW Killer", in the end they will still be competing for the same market share against Blizzard. Let's just hope that one day they are able to worry about the same issues that Blizzard currently does.

Be sure to check out WoW.com for an audio recording of the keynote.