Second Dinner, the company founded by several original Hearthstone team members, has announced two more members are joining their team!
- Bradley Crusco - Software Engineer. Previously held the same title on the Hearthstone team since June 2015.
- Tiffany Smart - Senior UI / UX Designer. Most recently worked on mobile games at Kung Fu Factory and MobilityWare.
These two pickups follow their announcements last month with Matt Wyble, John Zwicker, and Brenna Moore joining the team. All three had prior experience on the Hearthstone team.
- Matt Wyble - Head of Business. Worked as Business Director for Overwatch and Strategic Initiatives for Hearthstone (2013-2017!)
- John Zwicker - Principal Artist. Held the position of Sr. Artist at Blizzard for just over 8 years before joining the Second Dinner team.
- Brenna Moore - Infrastructure, Tools, Deployment. Credited with work across plenty of Blizzard titles, most recently with Battle.net Engineering. (Mobygames)
The company is working on its first game which is in partnership with Marvel. Considering the amount of talent on their team from Hearthstone, you really gotta wonder what their new game will feature.
Here's the welcome video, along with a view of their recently leased new office now that it is more moved-in. If you have ideas for their conference room names, hit them up on Twitter. Out of Cards sounds like a great name.
Comments
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The hardest thing to acquire in this space is name recognition and loyalty. Even if they create a masterpiece of a card game and have Marvel characters and everything else, it’s still not going to happen. A lot of the HS community is or was part of the WoW community, and the fact HS uses WoW lore makes it so much more fun. (I just wen back and read all about Galakrond since he’s in the new xpac... awesome storyline I never knew before). I wish them the best though!
I feel like they already have an audience just by being a Ben Brode project. I'm sure I'm not the only one that will play the game specifically because he's involved.
Also, Marvel is a much bigger brand than WoW. so if Hearthstone being a card game in the Warcraft universe was good enough to attract an audience, then their game being based in the Marvel universe should have a similar, if not larger, effect.
I don't think they need to do much to get an audience in the door. It's capitalizing on that audience that should be their primary objective.
But there are tons of Marvel-related games for android already. And none of them looks like it's worth wasting time on it.
BUT, you still looked at it. Marvel's name puts eyes on your project. It's on the developer to make the game look appealing to people. All I'm arguing is that Marvel + Ben Brode brings eyes to the project. The potential audience is right there.
Even though that video was basically just 'hey we have two more people on our team now' Ben Brode made it a delight to watch.
BB 's company is so well now , I still have noting to chang, How to make a change?
I do feel that at this moment they would need to offer something very new or a veeeery attractive price model in order to attract many new players. At the moment the card game saturation is very high and dealing the sunk cost attachment can be very hard.
i almost don't want to sink anymore money in hearthstone just cause i'm more interested in there game. I have to assume it'l be a card game of some sort with all the former hearthstone members there.
they confirmed that they are working on an unannounced Marvel game
its been so long since ive seen or though of ben brode. I miss him :(
It is interesting to know that there more people joining the Second Dinner. But you missed the most important message from Ben Brode, how could you?
There is a new rap comming out within one week! HYPE!
https://twitter.com/bbrode/status/1191744724106801153
Oh don't worry, it'll be frontpage'd so fast on release :D
Neat!
I'd like to know what they're working on, though. It's been what, a year with no news on what they're developing?
They're at least another year off an announcement. Game dev takes a long time!
Announcing too early and you risk letting other studios steal your ideas and get them out there faster.
No offense to Ben, but things lightened up a lot with HS after he left...
I think the changes that have happened since he left would have happened anyway. And I wouldn't exclude even better changes.
Designers evolve and learn. I trust that Ben, just like the current designers, would have seen the light in the end, that Hearthstone requires more frequent and ground shaking changes.
Did they though? Sure, things changed after he left, but you have to consider that even though he was the face of Hearthstone, i doubt much of the problems with hearthstone back in the day like lacks of gamemodes etc. weren't his fault but management decisions that led up to that point. Also i think of BB as a very creative person with the urge to implement his ideas. I wonder if the lack of possibilities or ways to be inventive when it comes to changing things was part of why he left.
He was a manager. His job was paperwork and PR not a card design so it was never his fault for any bad cards or bad meta.
yeah and I don't exactly see hiring former HS devs as a positive