Stefano Cozzi is a 20-year game industry veteran who has worked at Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games, and Italian studios PG Esports and Stormind Games.
The expert has moved from community development to large-scale personnel management, and today he teaches at IULM University and provides consulting on corporate culture issues.
In talks and interviews, the expert discusses the inner workings of development in detail, including the studio’s rapid expansion, battling toxicity in the community, and issues with employee burnout. In his view, modern crises affect expensive AAA projects with inflated budgets, while the main success factors remain competent leadership, honest feedback and attention to people, not just technical achievements.
In a recent podcast with Fette di Pixel, Stefano talked about the strict caste system that dominated Blizzard during the heyday of franchises like World of Warcraft and StarCraft II. He said company leadership artificially elevated leading game designers to the status of untouchable gods, while rank-and-file employees in regional offices served as disenfranchised buffers, forced to absorb all the negative fallout from an angry community.
Any attempts at direct dialogue between European support and Irving HQ have been severely suppressed, with feedback reports from poor players being filtered through a dozen bosses. In comparison, experts who moved to Riot Games pointed out that the culture of League of Legends is completely different, and employees at different levels communicate equally. As a result, isolation and detachment from reality led Blizzard’s star writers into a deep systemic crisis, followed by a complete collapse of the old management structure.
