Quote Originally Posted by Hasrat View Post
Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."
WoW team grew a lot duing early WoD and prior to that. Onboarding slowed them to a point of scrapping subsequent expansion patches. Aside of later mismanagement and poor working conditions they had problems making content at a good pace even when they had more people. If SE will want to hire locally then it will be hard to get more in as there is constant lack of skilled developers. They could start training juniors but it will take time. If they open a "studio" in a new region it's also will take time - and likely the plan will be to contain SE projects to specific studio location as team work on one MMO between people in multiple timezones and cultures may be difficult. Blizzard is still hiring for on-site work for all of their projects. Non-game-dev market during Covid went to remote work and stayed there for the most part benefiting from world wide hiring pool.