So a Bloomberg Article came out about an upcoming book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. The whole article/excerpt is a damning critique of Kotick and Activision’s ‘profit at all costs’ model clashing with Blizzard’s “players before profit” and “It’ll be ready when it’s ready” style of development. There is a fun quote below that I think we’ll enjoy, in the frustrating sense:
By 2017, Kotick and Tippl were battling with Morhaime every day. They asked why Blizzard had so many people in nondevelopment departments—particularly customer service and cinematics, a group that made short films based on the games. (The answer: Players appreciated those things.)
What this shows is something a lot of us have been saying for a long time. The narrative direction started to take a dive around 2014-ish, arguably earlier for some, though none of us really knew why. How it took an entire raid tier to get us Twitter integration and WoD seemed like a half developed mess. The article pushes forward still into Activisions near complete take over around 2018 when Morhaime stepped down, increasingly taking control and focusing on squeezing every cent of profit out of Blizzard rather than taking its time to develop (meanwhile, Blizzard was always majorly profitable regardless).
Brings us to BFA and Shadowlands, the last thing Metzen, and likely a lot of the older crew, worked on prior to the major shift from it being ‘Blizzard’ to really being Activision and Kotick. Even lower level staff new of the new ‘profit at all costs’ direction they were taking and saw Blizzard was unable to retain veteran or skilled employees. Not that I ever celebrate huge mergers, but Microsoft’s acquisition likely is the reason we see Metzen come back and are able to say ‘we’re going to plan out 3 whole expansions and get back to writing.’ This isn’t to excuse any mistakes or shortcomings Morhaime may have had, but clearly there was one side attempting to keep its “players before profit” and “It’ll be ready when it’s ready” model and one that wanted to drop new product every other quarter and stuff it with micro-transactions to make a quick buck.
Either way, book comes out 10/8 and I’ll certainly to sailing my way to acquire a copy or visiting my local library for all the chisme
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-25/book-excerpt-play-nice-the-rise-fall-and-future-of-blizzard-entertainment