Blizzard entertainment have had quite a few art contests in the past couple of years. All of which had interesting topics, cool prizes, and admission rules excluding all art submitted by artists from most countries.
Besides the fact that this is frustraiting, I really can’t figure out why they would do that.
Maybe it has to do with how complicated work permits from other countries are to process?
I suppose these contests are an opportuinity for Blizzard to find employees.
Probably because it would cost them alot money to allow those other contries to participate. Taxes, customs, shipping cost and so forth. It maybe sounds like a small sum of money when the pricepool is 1 million dolllar (or whatever), but most likely blizzard didnt pay a cent for those cintiqs they gave away to the winners, wacom did. And if you had to pay tax for all that, the cost of arranging the contest could be far more expensive.
Still a shame of course, since I too live in a country that is not allowed to participate:D
It’s kind of odd that Australia and New Zealand are on that list, we’re about as far away from the US as you can get (and have some of the more stringent import laws worldwide).
I doubt it has anything to do with taxes, customs or costs in general. Need I remind you that Blizzard have a dazzling income from WoW each month? They wouldn’t even feel the difference.
As for job applicants - the amount of job applications they receive each day really rids them of the need to look for other potential artists in alternative ways, I presume.
Don’t assume that because Blizzard has money that everyone in the company has money. The department that is heading up the contests likely has a different budget than other areas and costs may be a significant factor. I don’t know where every Blizzard location is but they must have offices in these locations therefore its more practical to only offer it there.
I would figure that a major portion of their capital gets reinvested every month right back into maintenance for their server farms which are located worldwide.
It may be as simple as the person heading up the contest doesn’t want to deal with the hassles of international shipping.
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