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Play Nice - A Preview Inside Activision and Blizzard’s Corporate Warcraft
Blizzard
Publicado
hace 15 días
por
Archimtiros
In a preview for his upcoming book,
Play Nice
, Jason Schreier shares an exciting look inside the unlikely partnership and inevitable division between Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Morhaime that reshaped both companies forever.
Play Nice: Read the Full Preview on Bloomberg
Play Nice
chronicles the creativity, frustration, beauty, and betrayal across 33 years of Blizzard Entertainment history.
While
Play Nice
covers the entire 33-year history of Blizzard Entertainment,
this particular section
by author Jason Schreier focuses on the now infamous
cancelation of project Titan
in 2013, six years after Activision merged with Vivendi to form the most valuable dedicated video game company in the world: Activision Blizzard Inc. Pitched as a successor to World of Warcraft, Titan was abandoned after years of mismanagement and a reputed cost of $80 million, and although it eventually led to a runaway hit with the release of Overwatch three years later, the failure of Project Titan brought financial concerns to the forefront - bringing on a profit-focused chief financial officer and growing a rift between Morhaime and Kotick.
Play Nice, Preview on Bloomberg
The key to Blizzard’s success was a philosophy, instilled since the early days, to value players above profits and to give every game as much time as it needed—a lesson learned in 1996, when the first Diablo missed Christmas but still sold a million copies, which was a big haul at the time. “It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” Blizzard employees liked to say.
In contrast, Kotick believed in games with what he called the “potential to be exploited every year across every platform,” and the floors of his company were littered with the corpses of franchises that had been sucked completely dry. Among them were Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Skylanders, which paired physical toys with a video game in an especially lucrative combination.
Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick and CFO (later COO) Armin Zerza.
In the years that followed, budget concerns and cost-cutting financial oversight became an every day part of life within Blizzard, with a greater emphasis on sales, growing development teams, and cutting support staff. Although both Activision and Blizzard shared the goal of releasing new content more quickly, they disagreed on how to get there; with Kotick suggesting bigger profit-sharing bonuses for the more successful World of Warcraft teams and Morhaime wanting equal share to encourage experimenting with new ideas.
Play Nice, Preview on Bloomberg
Suddenly, finance people who’d otherwise been relegated to the background were fixtures in strategy meetings, asking why Hearthstone, a Magic: The Gathering-esque mobile game, wasn’t pushing players to buy card packs more often and why Overwatch, an online shooting game, wasn’t selling maps and heroes to generate extra revenue.
Zerza seemed perplexed why Blizzard was maintaining expensive projects with low profit margins, such as the annual BlizzCon event. Blizzard managers explained that having their own convention engendered loyalty from customers and employees. Zerza suggested they kill it...
The concerns of Activision executives weren't without merit - Blizzard profits swung like a pendulum, and high performing years with major releases like Overwatch were offset by higher costs and lower profits in their off-years. Pushing Kotick to take greater control, the constant warfare and erosion of Blizzard autonomy took a toll on Morhaime as well as other high level staff, and following an initial attempt to resign in 2017, the founding member of Blizzard Entertainment finally made good on his departure in October of 2018.
Play Nice, Preview on Bloomberg
In April 2018, Johnson organized an off-site event for leaders of all three divisions: Activision Publishing, Blizzard and King. The theme was unification, or “One ABK,” as Johnson called it in the meeting. Kotick and Johnson were putting a corporate slogan behind a dynamic that had been apparent to Morhaime for years: Blizzard was losing its independence.
After the off-site, Morhaime wrote a lengthy email to Kotick, shared with several other executives, declaring that Blizzard had reached a tipping point. “I believe that preserving Blizzard’s culture and magic is a necessity for preserving Activision Blizzard’s advantage of having an organization that can attract and retain the best creative talent in the world and that can consistently produce the highest quality games and experiences,” he wrote. “It has been increasingly hard for me to provide Blizzard leadership and staff confidence that Blizzard has a stable future.”
Upon his departure, hundreds of employees wrote to thank Mike Morhaime and wish him farewell.
They soon discovered what he already knew: Blizzard would never be the same.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment
by Jason Schreier releases on October 8th of this year.
Play Nice
For video game fans, the name Blizzard Entertainment was once synonymous with perfection. The renowned company behind classics like Diablo and World of Warcraft was known to celebrate the joy of gaming over all else. 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. Activision began invading Blizzard from the inside. Glitchy products, PR disasters, mass layoffs, and a staggering lawsuit marred the company's reputation and led to its ultimate reckoning.
Based on firsthand interviews with more than 300 current and former employees, Play Nice chronicles the creativity, frustration, beauty, and betrayal across the epic 33-year saga of Blizzard Entertainment, showing us what it really means to "bleed Blizzard blue." Full of colorful personalities and dramatic twists, this is the story of what happens when the ruthless pursuit of profit meets artistic idealism.
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