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

by Jason Schreier

Way back in 1998, when Mike Morhaime first took the reins as president of Blizzard, he was a programmer who didn’t know much about how to run a business, so he leaned on Paul Sams as his partner. As Blizzard grew, Sams oversaw business operations, eventually becoming the company’s Chief Operating Officer, but no matter how much power he accrued, he demanded that his division stay in its lane. Marketing, community, finance, legal—any departments that weren’t making video games existed to serve the ones that were. Executive producers of the game teams had all the power, and developers were explicitly told by peers not to discuss money or business during meetings. This is Blizzard, people would say. We only talk about what’s fun for players. This was diametrically opposed to the Activision approach, which concentrated power in commercial organizations such as marketing and finance.