Play Nice
“Wait for the Jason Schreier article,” has become a common refrain among gamers over the past few years, as the Bloomberg journalist is known for his well-sourced deep dives into the inner workings of companies and often information on mistreatment of employees through crunch or harassment, or bad decisions that led to disastrous game launches.
After two previous books, Blood, Sweat and Pixels and Press Reset, Schreier has just announced Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. It’s a topic that is endlessly relevant as of late, first through the Microsoft acquisition, then recent mass layoffs and project cancelations, and even today as new owner Microsoft reportedly has plans to take/keep its acquired studios multiplatform.
But Blizzard has a long history and there’s a lot to discuss. I spoke with Jason about the book, which spans 300 different interviews he conducted, and he had a few things to say ahead of its release this fall on October 8.
While you have covered a lot of different companies, what caused you to want to focus on Blizzard specifically this time around?
Schreier: For starters, Blizzard is one of the most fascinating companies not just in the video game business but in all of business. Most companies would kill to develop just one billion-dollar cultural phenomenon — Blizzard has made five of them (Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, Overwatch). This is a company so beloved and successful that tens of thousands of fans fly out to California every year to attend a convention dedicated to its products. How many other companies can say that?
Yet the last few years have been devastating for Blizzard in all sorts of ways. The idea of writing a book about Blizzard has kind of been floating around my head since 2018, when Blizzard CEO and cofounder Mike Morhaime resigned with no explanation, and when I broke the news at Kotaku that Activision has been taking a larger role in Blizzard's operations. As I began hearing more about what was happening there, the idea crystallized in my head, and I started working on it shortly before I finished my last book, Press Reset.
I actually just found my first email about the project, from March 30, 2021, in which I wrote to my editor: "Obviously we still have to launch PRESS RESET but I've been mulling over my next project and wanted to gauge your interest in an idea I can't stop thinking about." That was just a few months before California sued Blizzard for sexual discrimination and misconduct, which made it feel even more vital that this story be told. This book is both a business and a culture story, and it's full of both boardroom drama and the struggles of creative collaboration.
Assuming you couldn't write an epilogue really quickly about the massive layoffs that just happened, in your reporting were there signs that indicated that was coming outside of the usual "there are layoffs when mergers happen" sort of thing?
Actually, I'm going to be spending the next few weeks rewriting the ending to incorporate the tragic events of the last couple of weeks. I did indeed hear rumblings that layoffs were coming, although I had no idea they'd be so deep. I figured Microsoft would mostly cut into non-development teams. Didn't think they'd slash jobs on Diablo and Overwatch and even cancel an entire project.
Overwatch 2
If you could pinpoint it, what are the main contributing factors to the relative downfall of Blizzard after launching GOTY contender Overwatch in 2016? What has the relationship been between the Activision side of things and Blizzard the past few years especially?
This is hard to answer in a few sentences (which is why I wrote a book about it), but I'll give you the short version. Activision merged with Vivendi Games to form Activision Blizzard in 2008. Bobby Kotick became CEO of Activision Blizzard while Morhaime became CEO of Blizzard, reporting to Kotick. In 2013, a confluence of factors led Kotick and his lieutenants to begin exerting more influence on Blizzard that only grew more intense over time. It's a story about a company that prioritized predictability trying to work with a company that prioritized creativity, and the messiness that ensued as a result.
The book answers a lot of the questions that people have about Blizzard's history, from the early days through the modern era. How did Blizzard transform from the dream of two UCLA students into a genuine video game empire? What happened to the company when World of Warcraft took off? Why did Morhaime leave? Why did Kotick want to mess with a company that seemed to be doing so well? What are the real stories behind games like Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and Overwatch 2? How many of Blizzard's problems were caused by Activision and how many were self-inflicted? What was Blizzard's culture like in the 1990s, and how did that evolve as the company grew bigger and more professional? And so on and so on.
What keeps happening with these huge projects that get cancelled, like Project Titan or now this now-dead Blizzard survival game? Is there one repeated mistake?
Lots of factors! The book tells the entire story of Titan: what it was, why it fell apart, how it turned into Overwatch, etc. And I actually just wrote a Bloomberg article about Odyssey's technical woes. I think people will come away from this book with a deeper understanding of how Blizzard operates and what it was really like to work there over the years.
Thanks to Jason for speaking to me, looking forward to reading the book later this year.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
