Blizzard Entertainment contemplates own Pixar-like University

Irvine, California-based video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment is reportedly considering an in-house professional development and educational program in order to meet its talent requirements.

This is expected to be something on the lines of elite film studio Pixar's own university and would help Blizzard meet the challenges of recruitment as it works on its enigmatic current project, codenamed Titan.

Talking to Gamasutra, the popular news and information portal for those in the video games industry, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pierce said that their continued success would depend on the development of a really talented team with some of the best developers in the industry and that they were trying to see if some of it could be nurtured internally.

Blizzard, the makers of games such as Diablo, StarCraft and World of Warcraft, has been likened in the past to Pixar and is now contemplating something that would inspire comparison again.

We're talking about what the Blizzard equivalent would be to Pixar University, if we can do anything like that to try to grow talent, Pearce said, adding that a project such as this would take years to complete. He also said that while an in-house facility was certainly being mulled over, it was still uncertain whether it would emulate the scale of Pixar University or would be relatively less ambitious. Blizzard, at present, has a learning and organizational development department through which it ensures continuous employee development in terms of their skillsets through opportunities in the online space.

Academy-Award winning animation studio Pixar founded its own university with a view to attracting and retaining quality animators, through which it offers three-month long courses for new and existing animators.