Blizzard North's three cofounders and Bill Roper leave the studio that created Diablo to pursue other opportunities.
According to a Reuters report, four key figures at Blizzard North have "resigned from the company to pursue other opportunities." Blizzard Entertainment told Reuters that the Blizzard North cofounders Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer, and David Brevik, plus Blizzard vice president Bill Roper, recently left the company. The report also quotes a VU Games executive as saying that Vivendi Universal's public efforts to sell its game division, including Blizzard, has had some effect on employee morale.
News source: GameSpot
View: Reuters Article
According to a Reuters report, four key figures at Blizzard North have "resigned from the company to pursue other opportunities." Blizzard Entertainment told Reuters that the Blizzard North cofounders Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer, and David Brevik, plus Blizzard vice president Bill Roper, recently left the company. The report also quotes a VU Games executive as saying that Vivendi Universal's public efforts to sell its game division, including Blizzard, has had some effect on employee morale.
News source: GameSpot View: Reuters Article
DAVID AND GOLIATH
Vodafone operations already use bare-bones RealNetworks software to bring live TV and music clips to handsets.
The deal will also affect mobile phone purchases, since Vodafone will tell vendors it prefers handsets with RealOne.
"Real will be able to sell to many more operators and handset vendors on the back of this deal," said industry analyst Neil Mawston at Strategy Analytics.
He said Real was now also well ahead of rivals such as Israel's Emblaze and PacketVideo.
A tough challenge looms, however, from software titan Microsoft, which already took a big chunk of the market for software that feeds live media to personal computers -- after Real pioneered the product in the 1990s.
Microsoft includes its Media Player in the ubiquitous Windows software that runs 90 percent of all personal computers and about half of all handheld computers.
Cell phones, however, will be no pushover for the world's largest software company, with hardly any of the 450 million cell phones that will be sold this year running on Windows.
As for RealNetworks, Finland's Nokia is so far the only handset maker with the RealOne player pre-installed on some mobile phone models, although Siemens AG and Samsung Electronics will soon start selling high-end handsets with the software.
The software will also be available for downloading to some phones and comes pre-installed on a several handheld computers from Palm, Hewlett-Packard and NEC.
Windows Media Player and RealOne generally are not compatible and cannot decode and play content encoded in the other format.
The RealNetworks software in Vodafone's mobile networks, however, will allow streaming of other formats, including the open MPEG4 format, Apple Computer's QuickTime and Windows Media Player. This keeps Vodafone's options open to include Microsoft devices in its handset range.
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