Play Nice
author and the gaming industry's preeminent investigative journalist Jason Schreier examines three decades of ups and downs at Blizzard Entertainment leading up to a hostile corporate takeover and a sexual misconduct scandal that put the legendary developer in a world of (Warcraft) trouble. For video game fans, the name Blizzard Entertainment was once synonymous with perfection. The renowned company celebrated the joy of gaming over all else, and every product it released was an instant classic: StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Hearthstone, and World of Warcraft, which forever changed the video game landscape. What was once two UCLA students' simple mission — to make games they wanted to play — launched an empire with thousands of employees, millions of fans, and billions of dollars. But when Blizzard cancelled a buzzy project in 2013, it gave Bobby Kotick, the infamous CEO of corporate parent Activision, the excuse he needed to start cracking down on Blizzard's proud autonomy. Led by executives from McKinsey and Procter & Gamble, Activision began invading Blizzard from the inside, driving away throngs of key employees in a push for predictability over creativity. Glitchy products, PR disasters, and mass layoffs followed, marring the company’s once pristine image.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2024–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I hate to just drop a book recommendation, but Jason Schreier's Play Nice covers the history of Blizzard in comprehensive detail.
The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes:
* World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and
* "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management.
My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.
Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.
- I just read the book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier (without having played any of their game or being aware that BlizzCon is around the corner). It seems they'll repeat their own mistakes.
I am getting more and more pessimistic about these studios and their AAA works. Every game is now a gamble with multi year effort with hundreds if not thousands of staff behind it. If a game doesn't sell, and that happens more than once, layoffs are coming. And for Blizzard specifically, it'd better be an online game that's going to be a multi billion dollar cash cow they can keep milking for years. If not, they would not work on the game in the first place.
Of course they have released many great games, but as the history has proven, you can't just keep coming up with new games that are original, fun if not addictive and also make money, especially with the fierce competition today.
Which makes me think I should spend more money/time on indie games than the action/adventure game from big studios that are increasingly repetitive and boring. We need more, smaller studios to give us something new.
