Games Workshop has listed a job vacancy for a Product Developer to take overall command of the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game line. It’s the fifth job opening for one of these senior positions to appear this month; applications to become the new Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Product Developer closed on Sunday, and GW is still accepting applications for the Product Developer roles for three Warhammer spin-off games, Warhammer Quest, Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team, and Blood Bowl.
The Product Developer is an overall vision holder and manager for the game line, who “will turn ideas into clear creative plans and briefs, giving our teams the structure they need to create fantastic new miniatures, books and games”. They need “a deep knowledge of Middle-earth and a real understanding of what makes its worlds, characters and stories so special to its fans” so they can “protect that original vision and make sure everything we create is worthy of Middle-earth”.
The advert on the Warhammer careers website doesn’t specify exactly how many people within the Warhammer Studio the post holder will manage, only that they need to be “highly organised, comfortable managing lots of projects at once”. As I reported when I covered the recent Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Product Developer role, that post-holder will report to the Operational IP and Product Director Max Bottrill, one level below the board; it seems likely the same is true for the MESBG Product Director.
Five job vacancies for senior roles appearing in less than a month suggests to me that this isn’t the result of posts falling vacant organically. GW doesn’t publish the management structure of the Warhammer studio, so take this as pure speculation, but I believe there’s been a restructuring, and that GW has invented a new management layer.
That could be for any number of reasons. Perhaps it’s administrative, rationalizing different roles and pay grades across different parts of the business. Perhaps it’s part of a strategy to separate the development of unrelated games so staff and systems can specialize to support them better.
Whether the Product Developers are a new management layer or an existing one, we now know that each of these games has or will soon have its own head honcho at roughly the same level of the organisational chart. I don’t think we can read this as a sign that every game will receive the same number of releases as Age of Sigmar. But the decisions about what does and doesn’t get made for each game will be held by people who only have to concentrate on that game line and what its customers want, without splitting their focus.
Would you like to see changes for MESBG, or is it perfect as it is now? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
