Mike Morhaime is getting together all the big names from Blizzard’s “Golden Age,” back before Activision started exerting its influence over Blizzard, in a new game publishing company called Dreamhaven.
Dustin Browder, Jason Chayes, and Ben Thompson are heading up the Moonshot subsidiary studio.
Chris Sigaty, Eric Dodds, and Alan Dabiri are in charge of the other subsidiary studio, Secret Door.
The stated goal of this new company is basically to go back to making more player-friendly games again, ones that don’t milk the players for as much money as they can, and to let the devs have more creative freedom over their content, rather than having their publisher’s executives dictate to them what they can and cannot do.
I’m pretty excited to see where this goes, and I can’t wait to see what they can come up with!
Yeah, saw this yesterday, it is actually very very exciting, even if a new game only comes in 3-4 years.
Also this:
I wonder how all this will impact hots and even blizzard’s future. It could mean the worse very easily, especially since most of blizzard’s games don’t generate the kind of money Activision actually wants from them. In fact, it is very weird to see them together, since their cultures are VERY different. Activision wants games that can be yearly released or have yearly content patches so they can get that big money, while Blizzard is always very communicative with its customers and they are not afraid of delaying things to actually make the game better. The W3 Reforged fiasco is definitely Activision’s fault. Other things as well.
This is actually very concerning, but at least we can hope for new big and good things from Dreamhaven.
excited to hear. hopefully the magic returns. goodness knows theres been some really great indie stuff the last few years. the future continues to shine
I’d like to weigh in on this. Dabiri’s problem was he never addressed the community. It’s like how Trump has changed the norm for a president. A president tweets a lot to communicate with the public and his base. Browder tweeted a lot. I even got a reply from him once or twice. Then Dabiri came in and was stone cold silent. They manufactured AMAs on reddit where they never answered tough questions. It’s possible that Dabiri can be given the benefit of the doubt in that all personnel were under the thumb of profiteers at Activision to make a compromised product not friendly to gamers.
I don’t think Dabiri is a bad person or developer, necessarily. But his track record isn’t stellar.
From what I’ve heard, his tenure as SC2 lead wasn’t great (reportedly, he gave Ultralisks 8 armor, which completely broke ZvT). And his tenure as HotS lead was definitely something I wish had never happened. It seemed like he lead from inside his own personal bubble and didn’t take to criticism too well. He had an idea for what he wanted and he was going to make it happen, and screw whatever anyone else said.
But he’s done good for some other Blizzard projects, and I think that if he gets to help build a project from the ground up it will have less of that “you’re ruining it!” feeling. Besides, he may surprise me and come up with something amazing.
I’m more stoked about Browder, cause he’s the one who initially got SC2 and HotS rolling.
I think HOTS is in a comfortable position. The lime-light would be on WC 3 Reforged and surprisingly WoW. WoW might be big, but they’re always expected to reach a mile-stone each time, with Hearth-stone not far behind.
I know, but these people leaving are the ones who made hots good and fun, and since lots of them left things have changed a lot and most changes were bad…
It could also mean the end of hots in a couple years, like servers closed. Activision doesn’t like blizzard already because their culture is VERY different, it could mean they shutdown all games that don’t bring the money they want.
It is not like hots has been doing well that you can just hire new stuff to continue the work… This all, especially the things confirmed by some people that everything that happened with activision so far is just the tip of the iceberg, can definitely be the end of an era.
And even if everything stays the same, imagine in a couple years this new company makes a very good game like the old blizzard, it gets famous and even more people quit hots to play that, it will definitely kill hots.
Overall, everything will impact hots for sure, and it is most likely to have a negative impact. Once you get in the hole, you can only go down.
