You don't work for Blizzard do you? When I worked there engineers (not my team thankfully) designed their own alternative to protobuf to try and save more bytes over the wire, which in my opinion was a really poor decision. Rather than get on with actually adding value, they ended up pushing back multiple other teams deadlines while adding almost no value. It was a classic "not built here" mentality and doing engineering work for the sake of the work, rather than actually ask "what problem are we trying to solve here?"
If protobuf works for Google then it essentially works for 99.999% of every other company on the globe.
If protobuf works for Google then it essentially works for 99.999% of every other company on the globe.