Game g = new Game();

Very interesting summary of a GDC Austin keynote by Blizzard about WoW (thanks Frank!):

• They try to structure the teams around the people, and not the other way around. They feel strongly that employee strengths should dictate organizational structure, and as a result all reporting structures within the company vary by team.
• Each team on the game aims to be made up of 5-8 people.
• The programming department currently consists of 32 people
• In all, the programming team is responsible for some 5.5 million lines of code.
• The art department is currently sitting at 51 people.
• Overall the art department is responsible for some 1.5 million assets.
• Production department is 10 members strong.
• Creative teams to not report to producers, he pointed out. Team leads, instead, take up leadership roles within individual departments. The art lead, for example, still creates art.
• Design department is 37 members strong.
• Over the years, the team has created some 70,000 spells and some 40,000 NPCs.
• The QA group has tackled some 180,000 bugs since the game launched.
• Localization currently tracks 360,000 text strings and some 2 million words.
• Data centers from Texas to Seoul, over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• As an organization, World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.

Frank Pearce: “World of Warcraft has completely changed the organization”