Interesting read from someone who interviewed hundreds of current and former employees.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/what-went-wrong-at-blizzard-entertainment/ar-AA1rQis8?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=9c13b51b737c43e89bf5ba5d28a6e3e9&ei=100
The company hired armies of developers and customer-service reps to keep up with the unprecedented demand, swelling from hundreds to thousands of employees. Within a few years, Blizzard had moved to a sprawling new campus, and its parent company had merged with a competitor, Activision, to become Activision Blizzard, the largest publicly traded company in gaming. By 2010, WoW had more than 12 million subscribers.
No company can scale like this without making changes along the way. For WoW to thrive, it would have to siphon talent from elsewhere. Players expected a never-ending stream of updates, so Blizzard moved staff from every other team to imagine new monsters and dungeons. Other projects were delayed or canceled as a result. WoW’s unprecedented growth also tore away at Blizzard’s culture. Staff on Team 2, the development unit behind the game, would snark to colleagues in other departments that they were paying for everyone else’s salaries.
Innovating, as the company had done so successfully for years after its founding, seemed to become impossible. Blizzard attempted to create a new hit, Titan, with an all-star team of developers. Mismanagement and creative paralysis plagued the team, but most of all, the team struggled with the pressure of trying to create a successor to one of the most lucrative games in history. Titan was stuffed full of so many ideas—the shooting and driving of Grand Theft Auto alongside the house-building of The Sims—that it wound up feeling unwieldy and incoherent. In the spring of 2013, after seven years of development and a cost of $80 million, Blizzard canceled the game.