[tijsvd]

No I don't work for Blizzard. When I did this, we were using a very fast custom wire format, but entirely hand-coded. Say flatbuffers without the code generation part. And having massive trouble with schema evolution.

Another group had already evaluated pb and found it way too slow. They had designed something similar but faster. I wrote my implementation of pb to prevent this, and showed pb could be fast enough. It was definitely the right choice at the time, as it gave us C++ speed close to the old format, plus easy interop with other languages.

> If protobuf works for Google then it essentially works for 99.999% of every other company on the globe.

Uh.. no. Google is a massive company, but if you browse the comments in this thread, you'll find multiple remarks like "this was built for Google's servers". Google have specific use cases, and they build software for that. The software may well be lacking for other use cases. I can totally imagine Blizzard wanting to write their own implementation, think of the benefits of reducing parse time in a multiplayer server.