While Blizzard Entertainment’s games share many traits in common – such as all being wildly successful money-printing machines – one of their games stands out as being a bit different than the others.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is currently one of the studio’s most popular games, with tens of millions of players and a consistent place in the top five most-watched games on Twitch, yet it shares little in common with Blizzard’s other games. It is free-to-play, available on both PC and mobile devices, and its gameplay mechanics are relatively simple compared to more epic-scale games like World of Warcraft.

According to former Blizzard Chief Creative Officer Rob Pardo, those differences were completely deliberate. Pardo explained some the studio’s goals behind creating Hearthstone in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, saying:

We had some ideas that might be interesting to do something in the online card game space, but a lot of it was just ‘hey, could we make a Blizzard game with a smaller team? Do we need to keep on making our teams bigger and bigger and bigger?’ It was as much an experiment around that as it was the game could be really successful. Like almost everything at Blizzard, we never think the game’s going to be as successful as it turns out, which is an awesome place to be. There’s definitely a lot of doubt early on. Is this the right place to put these guys? Even though it wasn’t a lot of people, it’s still really talented people.

Pardo explained that with the amount of money involved in large studios like Blizzard Entertainment, it can be difficult to take risks and experiment with new ideas. One of the primary goals behind Hearthstone, he said, was to see if Blizzard could make a successful game without the full weight of the studio behind it.

Pardo pointed to Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s Child of Light as another example of a small game created by a large studio, saying that while it may not become a widespread trend, “it might be an opportunity for these bigger studios to be a little more risky with something.”

Screenshot by Eric David