Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment

by Jason Schreier

In 1991, when two college students named Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime decided to start a video game company, they couldn’t have imagined that one day it would spawn an event like BlizzCon.

“It’s the reason we don’t have sex anymore!” —Actual quote from the wife of a tech support caller

It’ll be ready when it’s ready.

Westwood, the game studio behind Dune II, had put out a strategy game called Red Alert with a main character named Tanya, so Robert Djordjevich cheekily suggested that StarCraft feature a commando named Kerrigan—after the rival figure skater.

So many Blizzard employees dated and married one another that while reporting for this book, I would interview someone who worked there only to then learn that I had already talked to their spouse, who also worked there. This happened on three—three!—different occasions.

They were going to charge potential owners $20 million to buy an Overwatch League team?

I had no idea that's how the teams were founded🤯

Some may write “eSports,” but we will be having none of that here.

🤣

Some members of Blizzard’s PR and marketing teams feared that the news might be poorly received,

“We don’t have any plans at the moment to do PC,” Cheng said.2 When the crowd booed in response, he jokingly retorted: “Do you guys not have phones?” The clip hit the internet by storm,

The big focus, as Kaplan had always envisioned with his “crawl, walk, run” mantra, would be “player vs. environment,” or PvE, in which players would be able to fight computer-controlled enemies.

honestly I would have loved this! but it doesn't really seem to fit with overwatch's gameplay style

for the first time since 1994, Blizzard Entertainment was no longer working on a real-time strategy game.

2020

One policy she introduced, called stack ranking, asked managers to give ratings to each of their employees across a five-grade scale: Top, High, Successful, Developing, or Low. Each of those categories had a quota, and managers were expected to place around 5 percent of their teams in the bottom two—a

omg i haaaaaaate this so dumb

Oneal had stepped down because she was paid less than Ybarra.

yeahhh i remember that.

by January 2022, the deal was in place: Microsoft would buy Activision Blizzard for a total of $69 billion, the biggest deal in video game history.

Halloween-themed pack that charged $40 for four outfits.

Nobody really wanted to talk about the Overwatch League’s biggest problem: Overwatch wasn’t very fun to watch. Sure, the league had brought in hundreds of thousands of viewers for its biggest matches, but with its jittery first-person camera and busy visual effects, Overwatch could be impenetrable to people who didn’t play it.

I dunno, I though it was fun to watch. but I had also watched a LOT of it.

competitive video games were impossible to comprehend unless you already knew the ins and outs of those games.