Blizzard, the developer behind landmark series like Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch, struck gold repeatedly for over two decades. According to Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg reporter and author of the upcoming book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, it was not only a routine hitmaker; it was one of the unique studios that ever graced screens with its big, icey logo. Thirty-three years after it came on the scene as “Silicon and Synapse,” modern-day Blizzard is a shadow of its former self.
While its latest expansion to World of Warcraft, The War Within, and hits like Diablo IV keep the company in the public’s eye, the developer hasn’t yet recovered from massive sexual misconduct allegations and a $69 billion buyout by Microsoft. Schreier took on the task of writing about Blizzard just before Microsoft announced its intent to buy Activision Blizzard. Since the deal closed, sweeping layoffs have rocked the entire company.
The author worked for eight years at Kotaku (Gizmodo’s former sister site), reporting about the industry before moving on to Bloomberg. In Play Nice, Schreier documents Blizzard’s humble though ambitious origins from its founders, Allen Adham and Michael Morhaime, through the company’s burgeoning popularity with games like Warcraft 2, StarCraft, and Diablo II. Despite those hits, it was World of Warcraft that transformed the developer’s trajectory from a popular though relatively small game maker into an international conglomerate. During the mid-to-late 2000s, the in-game world Azeroth boasted more residents than several small nations.
Schreier writes with a journalistic eye that seems dry at first, but it sucks you into a rabbit hole of in-depth history told from the perspective of hundreds of former devs and people close to the company. The developer was known for its dedicated staff, who were expected to mix their social and professional lives within Blizzard. That culture became so toxic enough to female employees it blew up into a major sexual harassment scandal that resulted in the state of California investigating the company and a $35 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment is out Oct. 8. Preorders are available now.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What Was it Like Working at Blizzard Entertainment?
Gizmodo: In your book, you said you talked to hundreds of staff, former staff members, people ancillary to the company who knew Bobby Kotick, and everybody in between. You’re pretty much the de-facto Blizzard expert at this point.
Jason Schreier: It’s strange because I never worked there. I’ve been to their campus maybe twice in my life. So in many ways, I have blind spots. I don’t know what it was like to be there day to day. I don’t have that firsthand experience. But in some other ways, I know more about the company than people who work there, because I got so many different perspectives and heard so many stories just by talking to people who were there throughout all the different areas of Blizzard history.
Gizmodo: But even then, you mentioned at one point in your book, in one of the footnotes, that you were talking about how there were so many interoffice relationships at Blizzard and how you would interview one person and then interview their spouse, not knowing that they were married.
Schreier: I think it is a unique part of Blizzard’s culture. The California lawsuit I mentioned earlier was because of some cultural issues. And one of the cultural issues within Blizzard specifically was this kind of incestuous tendency of a lot of people to date each other on campus, including a lot of high-level staff and then people that were below them within the company. And that caused some problems. That also obviously led to good things for those people in their relationships. It’s a complicated subject, for sure.
Gizmodo: What about Blizzard that, right from the get-go, was different from any other company that set them apart, even from all those scrappy startups in the 90s?
Schreier: I think there are a couple of things. One is that they were undoubtedly, undeniably, really good programmers. They got some really elite talent. This one guy at Interplay I spoke to said they worked with a lot of developers. Blizzard was the best. They knew how to put in those little details and polish everything and really take everything to an A+.
The other factor, and this was more important, and I think it is more relevant than it is today, not a lot of people played video games back then, certainly not as many as play videogames today. That included people who ran some in the video game companies. So you had some of these big, big gaming titans back in the day that were run more by business people than by gamers. And there is some merit to that. They know how to run a business, but they also don’t understand games and what is appealing about them. I think Blizzard’s ethos from the very beginning was, not only are we run by gamers, we are also only going to hire gamers because everybody in the company needs to be able to play and test out these games and understand these games.
Then the question becomes, if we’re only hiring gamers, are we going to reject potentially talented people? And that ethos alone can cause some problems. It’s very complicated because that ethos can be problematic, but its undeniably part of the recipe for their success back then. I don’t know if that game would have been possible or would have been as polished and as fun as they were as if they weren’t made by a team of gamers.
Gizmodo: You described the Blizzard office as a frat house in the book. It reminds me of what I saw in college; there were forums where all the nerds congregated, and it always smelled like pizza. It always smelled like sweat. As soon as you start describing that in your book, I’m like—yep—I know, I know exactly what that is. That’s the local gaming shop back in my hometown, with pizza stains and, you know, beer on the carpets.
Schreier: Blizzard really changed a lot as the years went on. But, in the ’90s, you had to just accept that it was a boys’ club, that it was a frat house, and you either fit in or you didn’t. And for some women, it was hard. One woman who I mentioned in the book was a kind of a conventionally attractive woman, and she started working there and was harassed so badly that she quit within the first few months.
There are some really bad examples of things that happened. It’s a bizarre thing to think about because most companies today are not like Blizzard was. Even back then, most companies were not like that. In most companies where you go into an office, you come in your button-down shirt and your khakis, and you’re clocking in at nine, leaving a five. It was not only the stains and beer on the carpets. Blizzard became your life. When you’re not working, you’re playing games with people from work. Blizzard was an extra inextricable from their lives.
Gizmodo: You described how all-consuming it was, how people lost girlfriends, and how they worked so much. But also those people in the office became their friends. There was intense pressure from those making the original StarCraft and the incredible amount of crunch they went into to produce that game. Was it dedication, or was it the culture of expectation that they had to really push out something good?
Schreier: It was everything. It was the pressure. It was the culture. For some people, it was exhilarating and fun. And for some people, it was awful. For most of them, it was both. It was kind of like one of those things where you look back at it and you say, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe I did that.’ It was also pressure from the people on your level, because if your friends are all sitting in the office, you’re not going to be the jerk who goes home at 6 p.m. I have a little anecdote in the book. In the original StarCraft, you had these hero levels. Those were scheduled to be cut until one programmer decided, no, I’m going to stay in and work all weekend to get this working. And he did. That’s why they’re in the game and are still memorable today: because that one guy put in his weekend to get them running.
But that ruined people’s personal lives and relationships. I talk a little bit about how, on Diablo II, at Blizzard North, the director, David Brevik, worked so much that he eventually got a divorce and ruined his relationship with his daughters.
It can really be this kind of horrible and amazing thing all wrapped into one to work those kinds of hours on those games.
Blizzard’s Culture Would Eventually Lead to a Large-Scale Sexual Harassment Scandal
Gizmodo: Blizzard had an attitude of releasing a game when it was ready, but things started to shift slowly. Such an interesting aspect of this book is that we had this initial phase of Blizzard that ran up through the early 2000s, and then things started to shift, and that’s when things started getting a little bit rough.
Schreier: The publishers were pretty hands-off with Blizzard for a long time. I think one of the main reasons is that Mike Morhaime, co-founder and then CEO, and Paul Sims of Vivendi were shielding the company from many of those pressures. They were taking the beatings, managing up, promising people at Vivendi and all the corporate owners over the years that, ‘hey, if you give us time and you leave us alone, we will deliver you nonstop hits.’ And that was true for a very long time, until 2013. So six years before that, Blizzard and Vivendi Games merged with Activision to form Activision Blizzard, and Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision, became CEO of the entire entity.
In 2013 Blizzard canceled Titan, which was an $80 million debacle. It was supposed to be their next big MMO, the successor to World of Warcraft. Bobby Kotick was very excited about it. So canceling that was a major blow. And so that led to Activision beginning this whole process where they started applying more and more pressure. The book documents all of the ways that manifested, from forcing Blizzard to hire a CFO from outside the company to really ramping things up throughout 2017 and 2018, which eventually led to Morhaime’s resignation. That was the beginning of the end for Blizzard as people knew it.
Gizmodo: You just released an article where you interviewed some of the ex-Blizzard people who now started their own company. How much of the old Blizzard DNA still exists, but just now disparate and dissipated to various other groups.
Schreier: So Dreamhaven is announcing its next game next month. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens there. Dreamhaven is interesting because it was actually started by Mike Morhaime, his wife Amy, and a bunch of other Blizzard vets that they’ve known for a very long time. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there. One thing I noted in this interview I just ran with him is that Blizzard, in its 33-year history, never had a female director. Which I think was symbolic of some of their problems and led to some of their problems. Dreamhaven’s first game is directed by women, which I think is notable for sure.
Gizmodo: Why do you think it took so long for the sexual harassment scandals to come to a head in the late 2010s?
Schreier: It changed a lot over the years, and when you’re talking about a company with thousands of people, culture can be isolated to different departments within Blizzard. If you worked at Blizzard in 2015, for example, and you worked at Battle.net, your experience is probably much different than if you worked on the StarCraft team or the Diablo team or something like that, Battle.net, which I describe in the book was almost like Mad Men.
I think there’s been this idea floating around on the internet that Blizzard was this den of sex pests where you couldn’t work without being sexually harassed. And I don’t know if that’s an accurate depiction of it. I think from my conversations with women who work there, it was more that they loved the place a lot, but it also came with all these annoying drawbacks. Whether that was men hitting on you or making comments about the way you looked and stuff like that.
There was overt sexual harassment or more pervasive and insidious kind of subtle systemic discrimination. That was when you were looking around, thinking, ‘Hey, I’m the only woman in the room here.’ Or they would say, ‘Hey there, no women in leadership here. There are no women directors here. How can I possibly advance?’ And then if you don’t get a promotion, you say, is it because I’m not able to do this, or is it because I’m a woman? So that is really what gets into the heart of some of the problems that I think were more pervasive at Blizzard than the splashy stuff. And even the splashy stuff was based on non-truths, like the “Cosby Suite” stuff, which has become this kind of shorthand for Blizzard’s misconduct.
Gizmodo: And now Activision has merged with Microsoft. It’s now a mega-megalithic game company. As you were finishing this book, there’s been massive layoffs at Microsoft and elsewhere. Where do you think the games industry goes from here? Where does Blizzard go from here?
Schreier: It’s really hard to make any predictions about what Xbox is thinking. It’s all over the place, and it does not seem to have a consistent strategy. So, it’s hard to know what they want to do with Blizzard. There was a lot of optimism surrounding the buyout on Blizzard’s campus for what it might mean. Xbox head Phil Spencer came in, playing the games, and people lined up to meet him. Three months after that, hundreds of people were laid off.
I will say the new president of Blizzard, Joanna Faris, I’ve heard some good things about her, despite some initial skepticism because she came from Activision.
Is What Happened With Blizzard a Bad Sign for the Games Industry?
Gizmodo: Are we entering a new period where it doesn’t matter if the game is good or if the sales are strong; it just matters if it’s exponentially better than before? Is it possible we will reach a breaking point for the games industry?
Schreier: This is definitely not a new phenomenon. I would say the video game industry has always been like this. It’s always been cyclical and hit-driven, and irrational, serving the needs of a few powerful executives over the masses of workers, which I guess is the case for most industries. So, no, I don’t really think much has changed. I mean, as far as a breaking point, I feel like we’ve already hit a breaking point. I think things are broken. But I do think what’s happening now, the scale is bigger than it’s ever been. And that’s largely because game companies hired more people than they ever had before in the wake of Covid.
So the numbers are much higher now. But it feels like a correction to an industry that has just always been like this. It’s par for the course.
A lot of the companies that were Blizzard’s peers no longer exist. Westwood no longer exists, Sierra no longer exists, Interplay no longer exists. And that is not because they were all just releasing flops. It’s because that’s the way this industry works.
Gizmodo: I mean, we have tons of good game companies making games of smaller sizes that are excellent. One guy made Animal Well, and that’s incredible. Will we see another Blizzard in our time?
Schreier: What’s crazy about Blizzard is that any company in the world would kill to have Warcraft. Any company in the world would have killed to have Diablo, would kill to have Hearthstone, would have killed to have StarCraft, would have killed to have Overwatch, and Blizzard made all five of those.
Nintendo is the only other company that has done that, and they make consoles, so they’re in a different kind of realm. There’s no other kind of outside third-party game developer that has made that many hit franchises that have resonated with that many people, made that much money, and had that many sequels, spin-offs, movies, and other successful properties. So now, in many ways, it feels like Blizzard was this kind of unique company that it would be very difficult for anyone to replicate.
That said, I mean, maybe that’s for the better. Maybe Blizzard had some problems that shouldn’t be replicated. I think, in many ways, this book is a story about the dangers of growth. I think what happened with Blizzard is really a cautionary tale about what happens when your company goes from hundreds of people to thousands of people, and you release this mega-hit that just changes everything.
It’s hard to imagine a company quite on the same level as Blizzard ever again. But who knows? Anything can happen.
