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

by Jason Schreier

Heroes of the Storm remained an important pillar of esports, where Blizzard supported a collegiate league called Heroes of the Dorm (televised on ESPN) and a high-stakes tournament known as the Heroes Global Championship. At BlizzCon 2018, professional Heroes of the Storm players battled over a $1 million prize pool and were told that Blizzard planned to support the program for at least another year. A trailer teasing new Heroes of the Storm content for 2019 included “HGC” as part of a large montage of upcoming features, and behind the scenes, Sigaty and the rest of the leadership team had developed an esports plan for the coming year that was approved by J. Allen Brack, Ray Gresko, and Armin Zerza. But now the entire Activision Blizzard organization was gearing up for significant cost cutting, and the Heroes 2.0 update hadn’t been as lucrative as they’d hoped. In the middle of the night on December 13, 2018, Blizzard put up a blog post declaring that the company had “made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams.” The struggling MOBA would still receive new content updates, Blizzard said, but “the cadence will change” as the company pivoted to “long-term stability.” Many members of the team wound up getting jobs elsewhere within Blizzard, while others were laid off. Supporting esports for another year would require them to cut even more jobs at Blizzard, so Brack and his team decided to reverse course on their previous plans,...