Play Nice - A Preview Inside Activision and Blizzard’s Corporate Warcraft
In a preview for his upcoming book, Play Nice, Jason Schreier shares an exciting look inside the unlikely partnership and inevitable division between Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Morhaime that reshaped both companies forever.
Play Nice: Read the Full Preview on Bloomberg
Play Nice chronicles the creativity, frustration, beauty, and betrayal across 33 years of Blizzard Entertainment history.
While Play Nice covers the entire 33-year history of Blizzard Entertainment, this particular section by author Jason Schreier focuses on the now infamous cancelation of project Titan in 2013, six years after Activision merged with Vivendi to form the most valuable dedicated video game company in the world: Activision Blizzard Inc. Pitched as a successor to World of Warcraft, Titan was abandoned after years of mismanagement and a reputed cost of $80 million, and although it eventually led to a runaway hit with the release of Overwatch three years later, the failure of Project Titan brought financial concerns to the forefront — bringing on a profit-focused chief financial officer and growing a rift between Morhaime and Kotick.
Play Nice, Preview on Bloomberg
The key to Blizzard’s success was a philosophy, instilled since the early days, to value players above profits and to give every game as much time as it needed—a lesson learned in 1996, when the first Diablo missed Christmas but still sold a million copies, which was a big haul at the time. “It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” Blizzard employees liked to say.
In contrast, Kotick believed in games with what he called the “potential to be exploited every year across every platform,” and the floors of his company were littered with the corpses of franchises that had been sucked completely dry. Among them were Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Skylanders, which paired physical toys with a video game in an especially lucrative combination.
Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick
