Jason Schreier has been breaking the biggest stories in gaming news since the 2010s. From 2011 to 2020 he was an investigative reporter at the gaming site, Kotaku. Since then he has moved to Bloomberg to continue reporting on the gaming industry.
He previously wrote two books about the games industry. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made (2017) each chapter covered the development of a specific game, including Diablo III, Uncharted 4, Shovel Knight, and Stardew Valley.
In his second book Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry* (2021) different studios that fell apart and the people behind those studios. Many of them even saw great success before and after shutting down. These stories still resonate today with industry wide closures and layoffs.
*You can find my previous post on Press Reset right here.
His third book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment releases today (October 8, 2024) and takes an entirely different approach. Instead of each chapter delivering a contained story, Jason dives headfirst into the full history of Blizzard Entertainment from the early days all the way to today.
Why Blizzard?
When it comes to the gaming industry and you think of big studios, Blizzard is an obvious choice to cover since this company means so many different things to so many different gamers. Whether you’re into World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, or something else entirely, Blizzard Entertainment has created a vast catalog of games that spans across multiple genres.
Blizzard even holds their very own Comic Con-style convention, BlizzCon each year — with a few exceptions including 2020 and this year. Each year tens of thousands of fans would show up, many cosplaying, for their favorite Blizzard franchises. In the book Jason even mentions how Blizzard artists and game developers were treated like rock stars at these events.
I have always thought of Blizzard Entertainment as the HBO of gaming. When it comes to original shows, HBO delivers to the highest standard. We wouldn’t expect the same unintentional errors and goofs from an HBO show as say a Showtime or Netflix show. Why do you think everyone freaked out so hard when a Starbucks cup was seen on an episode of Game of Thrones? We’d expect that from something like Those About to Die on Peacock, or a SyFy channel original movie, but not HBO’s Game of Thrones!
Blizzard’s prior commitment to quality and belief that games should not be released “until they are ready,” were just some of the reasons why Blizzard was on top of the gaming industry. It was the dream job, and still is, for many game makers.
I had friends who were heavily into World of Warcraft, and I always appreciated the game but never got into it. It wasn’t until the 2016 release of Overwatch that became a real Blizzard fan. From there I branched out to other games, Diablo III, Hearthstone, even a trial of World of Warcraft — but still not too much. I have since dropped off of my Blizzard games, but I do occasionally revisit Overwatch 2. I’m just not a fan of the Fortnite battle pass system in Overwatch 2.
I plan on getting into Diablo IV once I have the time. Maybe now that the new expansion, Vessel of Hatred, has been released. I really enjoyed the demo, but I know how time consuming a Diablo game can be.
Play Nice
Jason Schreier had to do so much research to write Play Nice. In his previous books he only needed about 10-20 pages on each subject. This time he wrote over 300 pages on a single subject, Blizzard Entertainment. And it was a great read.
I remember hearing many of these stories as they happened in real-time. Reading about them in more detail gave me a better understanding than seeing a tweet or headline about these particular stories. There were even some stories that I had completely wrong in my head.
The book itself is broken up into three sections: RISE, FALL, and FUTURE.
RISE
This section begins with Allen Adham and Mark Morhaime, Blizzard co-founders, and their love of games. The story of Blizzard starts off like so many other game studios — two people want to create games. They want to make something that they would want to play themselves. This section moves through the successes Adham and Morhaime had early on. This was the time when they were free to explore ideas. The team started to grow and problems began to arise.
FALL
The second section of Play Nice immediately introduces our villain, Bobby Kotick. Kotick was the leader of Activision when they acquired Vivendi and merged with Blizzard, thus creating Activision-Blizzard. I always thought of Bobby Kotick as a bad person for the gaming industry, and the stories in this book only cemented those thoughts.
Originally some of Blizzard’s biggest franchises came from the team thinking of the types of games they were playing and adding new elements to make them better. Kotick wanted to straight up copy whatever the top studio was doing at the moment, and this doesn’t always work. In fact, it rarely ever works.
Even when Epic Games changed the Fortnite model to a free-to-play battle royale (thanks to the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds), they still ended up creating the battle pass and other elements that made Fortnite what it is today.
FUTURE
Today, Blizzard seems to be moving towards a brighter future. After being purchased by Microsoft they were saved from the Kotick regime, however things didn’t start out so great following the acquisition. Still, it now seems that the different teams at Blizzard are now able to make the games they want to make, without worrying about benchmarks and bottom lines.
Play Nice is an important read for any Blizzard fan. I really enjoyed learning about how this company was built, and which games they started with. Even how certain games came in from elsewhere but became Blizzard projects.
I also got a better understanding of my social media echo-chamber. Instead of relying on what you see on your timelines, maybe it’s better to explore some news articles from different sources.
Throughout the pages of Play Nice I noticed many parallels with the current climate in the gaming industry. We’re currently seeing many unsuspected layoffs and closures. Also, small studios are being purchased by bigger ones, where restructuring is happening.
I’ve also seen some good things lately. We have some small indie teams that have published and developed successful games in the past, who are now lending a hand to small, first-time developers. Teams like Yacht Club Games, Innersloth (with the Outersloth project), and recently Devolver Digital (with Big Fan Games).
Overall, Jason did a great job putting together this whole history of Blizzard Entertainment. I can even see this becoming a documentary series. I’m excited to read his next book in a few years, but for now I hope we can get some DLC on the Blizzard situation in a couple of months. Around the gaming industry things are always changing.
*Thanks to Grand Central Publishing for sending a over a copy of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment
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