As a reward for finishing my latest Pluralsight course (releasing soon), I told myself I could buy Diablo IV. I played the early access weekends in May and was sold immediately – I've always been a fan of Diablo games since the days of having LAN parties in high school with Diablo II.

Sometimes I like to read the behind-the-scenes stuff since I'm a nerd, and on a piece about the graphics of Diablo IV, under "Guiding Principles" the lead graphics engineer says:

The Diablo IV Graphics team’s goals and philosophy are rooted in the same values that drive Blizzard’s success. We are a gameplay-first company, meaning that every decision we make needs to be in service of creating a game that’s fun to play.

I believe GamerRel and DevRel have a lot in common – as they should: they are both for growing communities and adoption around their respective niches.

So as I read this, I was thinking, what would it be like to write this from the perspective of your DevRel org or even as a founder of a developer-led company?

I imagine it could go something like this:

The DevRel team’s goals and philosophy are rooted in the same values that drive COMPANY's success. We are a developer experience-first company, meaning that every decision we make needs to be in service of creating a product that’s friendly to developers.

These are important words:

in service of

Blizzard sees themselves as in service of providing fun gameplay to gamers.

I feel like what's most interesting is that this needs to be stated. Is there a gaming company who isn't in the business of making fun games? And yet, it seems it needs to be explicitly set as a Guiding Principle, so all the teams at Blizzard have this in the back of their mind whenever they're making decisions.

Has your organization or company been crystal clear on what your decisions should be in service of?

Have a lovely day,
Kamran