Jason Schreier has a book out called Play Nice – The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. In an “Ask Me Anything” round, the industry insider revealed some juicy details about the developer of WoW, Diablo and StarCraft.
Who is Jason Schreier? The Bloomberg employee is considered one of the best-known and most influential investigative journalists in the games industry. His research and reports provide insights into problematic projects such as Anthem, Diablo 4 (via Kotaku) or Destiny 2, they uncover scandals (e.g. at Blizzard) and give those affected a voice.
After “Press Reset” and “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”, Schreier has now published his third book entitled “Play Nice – The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment” about the 33-year history of the studio behind popular To shed light on franchises such as Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo.
Thanks to WoW: The War Within, Blizzard is currently on the rise again. But for how long?
World of Warcraft: The War Within – Cinematic Trailer
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Spicy details and anecdotes about Blizzard
What insights does Jason Schreier provide in his book? Anyone who has read the author’s numerous Blizzard reports for Bloomberg and Kotaku before that might have a good idea of how detailed Jason Schreier goes into topics such as the sex scandal, the PR disaster surrounding the announcement of Diablo Immortal or the problems of Warcraft 3 Reforged can be addressed.
The book is said to incorporate findings from more than 350 interviews with people from the Blizzard or Activision Blizzard environment. In an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, he gave an exciting sample of his insider knowledge. Here are some of the nuggets from Schreier’s answers:
Blizzard was briefly owned by a company called Cendant, which was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for massive fraud and whose CEO ultimately went to prison.
There is said to have been a Lennon/McCarthy-esque feud between Chris Metzen (lore guru for the major Blizzard franchises) and Rob Pardo (was at Blizzard from 1997 to 2014, including as chief developer for WoW). Pardo’s management style at the time was probably to blame, among other things.
Aside from the sex scandal, there are said to have been consensual swinger parties among Blizzard employees, which may have damaged the professional environment and power structure.
Mike Morhaime resigned as CEO primarily because he was tired of fighting with Bobby Kotick for control of Blizzard – especially after the cancellation of Project Titan.
Overwatch was a huge success. The team quickly became overwhelmed as they had to deliver new content for the service game, help out with the Overwatch League and develop Overwatch 2. Kotick’s solution: Hiring hundreds of employees to build something like the Call of Duty teams. However, this destroyed the culture and caused many other problems.
The credo “The players first” is lived by many employees at Blizzard. They use BlizzCon to recharge their positive tank, which allows them to get through tough crunch phases or times better.
But Schreier also stumbled upon a few events in which players had a strong negative influence on Blizzard. As an example, he cites the toxic behavior of parts of the community towards Jay Wilson after the launch of Diablo 3 and how negatively this changed the developer’s life.
There was a team at Blizzard that spent years developing all sorts of pitches and prototypes for a new real-time strategy game – including Warcraft 4 and an RTS for Call of Duty. However, there was never a “go” from the decision-makers. At some point, many of the team’s developers quit to work on Stormgate at Frost Giant.
The tightening of the monetization of Blizzard games did not come from pressure from Activision, but because Blizzard had grown incredibly after the enormous success of WoW and was burning a lot of money every month. Bobby Kotick only gradually increased the pressure after Titan was hired, although many teams only noticed this in 2017/2018.
The fact that there was no further expansion for Diablo 3 was due to the cancellation of the auction house. Without the sales from AH, D3 didn’t make enough money to justify the developers of another addon.
In the meantime, Netflix series for Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo were in production. However, when the streaming provider began poaching employees from Activision Blizzard, the projects were discontinued – and a lawsuit arose (via variety.com).
The fact that Blizzard paid its employees very poorly for a long time led, among other things, to the founding of ArenaNet (Guild Wars) and Carbine (WildStar) by former Blizzard employees.
In the AMA round, Jason Schreier revealed that he grew up with Blizzard titles like Warcraft 2, StarCraft and Diablo 2 (and put way too much time into them). He also invested hundreds of hours in StarCraft 2. In the early days of WoW, he was there to make the Molten Core unsafe. And he played Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 (although not as intensively).
Not only Jason Schreier analyzes what happened at Blizzard, but also MeinMMO. Similar to the Bloomberg journalist, we have also come to the conclusion: it is not Activision that has the “good old Blizzard” on its conscience, but the success of WoW.
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