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

by Jason Schreier

When Morhaime called Kotick to tell him that Blizzard planned to delay the next StarCraft a year, he was shocked when the new boss asked how he planned to make up for the missing revenue. Back in the Vivendi days, slipping a year might not have been a huge deal, because Blizzard had been such a small part of the broader conglomerate, but now, the bump could have a significant impact on Activision Blizzard’s stock price. It was like Blizzard had gone from small fish in big pond to big fish in small pond—except the pond was full of investor piranhas who expected revenue growth every quarter.

The money was insignificant for a company as large as Blizzard, but the deal sparked other concerns. Video game broadcasting existed in a legal gray area that didn’t yet have clear precedent either in Korea or the United States, and Blizzard’s executives wanted to ensure that StarCraft didn’t somehow fall into the public domain. They’d already seen the trademark for their online platform, Battle.net, get rejected in South Korea, where it was used as a generic term to refer to playing games online. The

For the next three years, Blizzard and KeSPA held a series of on-and-off negotiations that grew increasingly contentious, peaking during one meeting where, according to several attendees, a representative for KeSPA looked at Blizzard’s Paul Sams and declared: “We’re FIFA. You guys are just the fucking soccer ball.”

After a couple years of development, they put together a vertical slice, or a sample of the game, to show the rest of Blizzard. It was a mage vs. mage battle, so they called it the “fire and ice” build, and they brought in the company’s executives and directors for a playtest. The following week, Pardo joined their team meeting, which was unusual. He stood up and congratulated them, declaring that Hearthstone had been greenlit. “I was thinking: I’ve been working on this game for four years,” said Brode. “It wasn’t greenlit this whole time?”

During the development of Diablo III, Pardo asked the team to build a new interface for the chat system, according to two people who worked on it. After a few months of development, the team had a check-in meeting with Morhaime, who was shocked that they had wasted their time and asked why they weren’t just using World of Warcraft’s system. “Pardo said: ‘Yeah, why would you guys do this?’” recalled one person on the team. “He threw the team under the bus.