Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
All I know about WoW is they bought out a company with 100 game developers so that they could work on WoW, so that they could reduce their patch gaps from 9 months to be what it is now. My guess is they had to do this because they struggled to recruit (especially with what was going on at the time) and the people in that company were local.
Blizzard's Team 2 has always been in charge of WoW, and the number varies depending on how many other internal Blizzard studios are put in charge of the game at that particular time. The patch release cadence was increased to 8 weeks from Dragonflight onwards to allow for a constant number of additions (which is why people pay for subscriptions) and with TWW has also led to 3 fixed seasons but which fill up over the course of the expansion with sub-patches to give story content, gear etc.

Making investments is an important part of maintaining a service, if you don't apply investments you just have a drop in overall quality and it's not good for the game itself. Blizzard experienced a drop in activity during Shadowlands due to both the quality of the expansion and the excessively long release of content, and has restructured the release cycle so that there are no longer any empty periods.