because he did design work on homeworld 2, CoH, Dawn of War...ohh yeah and his latest game sold 10 million copies. Giving him the sack is a laughable notion dreamt up by butthurt autistic retards.
He did support design work on HW2, presumably minor stuff because MobyGames doesn't even list him in credits, and HW2 wasn't exactly free of problems.
He also did some mapping or at least map design in Blood, which was awesome, but Blood 2 where he was given free reign over both game concept and design was a boring turd.
Looking at his track record I would have never put him in lead design position, although I might put him on map design or somewhere else where his design- and concept-wise retardation could do no harm, due to actual design and assets he would have to work with having already been solidified by someone competent and where he could put his already demonstrated talents to good use (if he was one of the main designers responsible for Blood environments, then he evidently can kick some serious ass in this area).
Besides, sacking Jay Wilson III would likely be a good popularity and reputation stunt for Blizzard and I really don't see Kotick et. al. having the kind of human qualities that would prevent them from doing that if they smelled the money.
If Blizzard put a drunk hobo in charge of Diablo3, it would still sell 10 million copies
This.
People have this laughable notion that sales strongly correlate with quality. They don't, especially early sales. They correlate with expected quality and therefore are function of reputation of franchise or its makers and hype. That's it. Most of 10M people who bought D3 had no clue about D3 quality, because they haven't been able to experience D3 quality.
Even if Blizzard kidnapped everyone who bought D3 immediately after purchase and stole their kidneys the game would still sell 10M. I guess having your kidneys stolen must be quality experience if 10M of people would be willing to pay for it.
That's your brain on capitalism, I suppose.
The only sales representative of game's quality are late sales. If your sales peak at release and then drop off sharply, then you have two explanations:
-You saturated the market (which is unlikely even for blizzard because it would require 100% hype penetration - in other words having some literal mind control system as part of your hype machine), your game's quality can't be inferred from that scenario
-Your game is shit. Players will be much less likely to buy your next game.
Edit:
Jay Wilson'd from a different angle:
http://blood.wiki-site.com/index.php/User:Tchernobog/archive/shade