YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Morhaime

lines on the record: 60
first: 2024-10-03
most recent: 2024-10-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think being able to make the headlines of, oh my God, Xbox is this powerhouse. I'm sure that was a part of it. It remains to be seen. Like, who knows? Microsoft strategy. It's been such a mess. Like Xbox strategy as a whole this year. That, like, it's really hard to tell. Like, a lot of people fantasized about, oh my God, Microsoft, they're going to bring back StarCraft and let the Age of Empires people make StarCraft or maybe a new WOW expansion will be made by like, I don't know.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's only been a year since Microsoft took over, so there's a lot of time left to make these big changes in cultural change. But like, it remains to be seen what kind of long-term effects this will have. And something I always think about is when the Activision Blizzard merger happened, it took six years before problems really started, and they didn't really manifest to the broader company until a few more years after that. So it's hard to really know. It takes a long time before you really know what the repercussions of like a massive M&A deal really are.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's more of a big oil tanker than it is the nimble creative boat that it was back in the day. But that's been the case for a long time. I think there was more optimism under Microsoft a year ago than there is today because of all the cuts. And I think being at a company where there are just layoffs are hitting twice a year is just miserable no matter what. And I think people need to get through that to really just feel like morale is going to go up. But Blizzard also, they have a new president now, Johanna Ferries. For the first time, a woman is leading the company. And so that has been a big deal. A lot of people seem to like her and it remains to be seen. The big picture changes she's going to enact, but a lot of people are hopeful. There have been some more recent issues that I think are still not quite addressed, such as return to office. That's a big ongoing conversation because Blizzard made people return to office. And I have stories in the book about people who had to return to office. And then three months later, they were laid off, which is incredibly fucked. It remains to be seen.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah I mean, there's definitely still a blizzard. They actually just released this new WOW expansion that people really love. They have this new Diablo 4 expansion coming out in just a few days that is pretty highly anticipated. It's definitely still a blizzard, even if it's a little bit different than it was in the past.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's Microsoft's corporate culture, there's Activision's corporate culture, there's Blizzard's corporate culture, there's the mashup of all of them, there's a desire to improve, there's the employees wanting it to improve. What to make of this at the end of this all. Is there still a blizzard?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blizzard also recently got its first female executive producer, a woman named Holly Longdale, who is the head of World of Warcraft now. So there is change very slowly, but very surely. One thing that's happened in recent years is that employees are a lot more willing to call out the BS. A lot of people are willing to take to Twitter and call out their bosses. They're willing to whistleblow. They're willing to make a scene within the company on Slack and do all that sort. And that can have some negatives and repercussions, especially when someone's voice gets amplified, but they're not necessarily telling the truth. They're like a disgruntled employee. But internally, it has led to some real progress, I think, at a lot of gaming companies.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny you ask that because Blizzard's co-founder Mike Morheim is just like starting to talk about his new company. He started this company called Dreamhaven four years ago and they just started making the press rounds. They're about to announce their new game. And just a few days ago I interviewed him and a couple other top people there. And one thing that I found really noteworthy was that one of the people I was talking to was this woman named Aaron who was the director of the game they're about to announce. And it was like, oh, hey, okay, this is there's a female creative director here. This is a change from the blizzard days. And that's not to say that I've interviewed people there and checked on the culture or made sure that like everything's something up and up or anything because I haven't done that yet. Question mark. But even that is just a sign that someone like Mike Morheim recognized some of the problems and is like, okay, like we want an atmosphere where we can give a woman an opportunity here because it seems like that was an issue at Blizzard. So yes, absolutely things have changed. I mean, there's been progress overall like across the industry.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This criticism of the games industry is a long one. It has been around for a while. It has been loud for a while. The industry has reacted in different ways. Gamers, whatever it's worth, have reacted in different ways at different times. Have things changed? Are we making new companies that have learned lessons or are we still making companies in the mold of Blizzard?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You scale up, the more you need to kind of look around and be like, oh, okay, are we going to have to be publicly traded and deal with those compromises? Are we going to have to bring in VCs and make different kinds of compromises or private equity and watch your company get gutted or something like that? So growth is really fundamentally what it all comes down to. Too much scale.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they became an empire, and suddenly they went over the course of just a few years. They went from a company of hundreds to a company of thousands. Soon enough they merged with Activision, and for a while that was good until the tightened debacle that I mentioned, and then Vavikodek and Activision started applying more pressure because they felt like Blizzard was not delivering, was failing to meet the expectations that they had. And obviously there are a lot of twists and turns along the way, a lot of ups and downs in that relationship as time went on. But fundamentally, you have this company that is faced with this challenge of supporting World of Warcraft, and that means hiring thousands of staff because this game is the biggest thing on the planet. And to do that, you need to operate at a much bigger scale. It's really just growth and scale and size. And this, to me, the book, PlayNice, is a story about what that does to people and companies, what scaling up really does, which I think is a very familiar story in the tech world in a lot of the gaming world.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the biggest issue and the core tension, the reason for that tension, like the explanation behind this, is that budgets have gotten so big in the video game industry because they're taking so long these games to make a few years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the average time for a game was like two to three years and now it's like five to six years, which means twice as much of a budget like you're essentially paying your staff for double the time. Now we're seeing budgets in the hundreds of millions. It's pretty wild. And by necessity, these companies have to be publicly traded because they're the only ones who can afford to make those kinds of games. And if you're publicly traded, you are in service to your shareholders and your board of director and watching that stock tick up. In Blizzard's case, it's really interesting. I feel like the kind of big turning point for this company was really World of Warcraft because throughout the 90s and early 2000s, they were really successful, hit after hit, just constantly growing. But it wasn't until World of War”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not the case for a company like Blizzard or Activision. It feels like the video game industry has just been reckoning with that tension for a long time. Blizzard is sort of a paradigmatic example of that tension. Has that changed? Have we built systems to deal with it yet? Because it doesn't seem like anyone's figured it out, but I'm curious from your perspective.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I think about a lot when it comes to games and game companies is the tension between we are a bunch of artists who make culture, the culture impacts people, it makes people feel feelings, it's art, we're going to act like artists and rock stars. Oh, by the way, this is also a software company and these things, these projects take six years, seven years. They cost billions of dollars in public company stock prices are riding on them. Like a rock band doesn't have that pressure, right? Like Taylor Swift is a billion dollar corporation, but she gets to make all the decisions. Yeah.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If things have changed or if things have stayed the same, and I think internally these companies try to have those conversations, try to have big summits where they get into that sort of thing and hopefully leads to more changes than it did in the past. But yeah, I mean, for any company like this, you have to just be working at it every day in order to actually make improvements. So it's never a fixed or a done thing. It's always just this ongoing battle.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Blizzard had a really poor infrastructure for dealing with. And that, I don't know if it's something that they fixed, it's certainly something that has been talked about a lot more, it's certainly something that they've said that they have people coming in to fix, but it's the type of thing where it's difficult to know until there's another critical mass of people all talking about something. Even with the blizzard, like the lawsuit, and I get into this a lot in the book, the lawsuit, it had some problems for sure. It was pretty sloppy. It was misleading in a lot of places. You can write anything in a lawsuit complete. So it definitely wasn't 100% accurate. But it did capture this fundamental truth for a lot of people, especially women who work there, which is that like, hey, there are some big problems here. And here's my story. And so a lot of people came out in public to tell their stories. And that's what kind of led to this big cultural reckoning for Blizzard at the time. You kind of need to have that again at some point and have an ongoing conversation at some point to really.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not something that people can ever really solve, it's something that's an ongoing conversation, especially in these male dominated industries. And the video game industry is still mostly men. I think that the most recent set I saw at Activision Blizzard was they had something like 26 or 27% people identify as women or non-binary. And so there's always going to be something. I think for a lot of people, the bigger issue at Blizzard was not so much that there was harassment or discrimination because those things are going to happen at any company of thousands of people. The bigger issue for a lot of people was that HR didn't really do much about it or like that people didn't seem to be fired or punished when they were accused of that sort of thing or that people would complain about not being paid equitably and just be told that their problems weren't a big deal or like that it wasn't true gaslight or told they were making it up or whatever it was there were a lot of kind of these systemic issues that”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much do you just spend? Let's take a closer look at those P&Ls. And so there's been a ton more pressure on the Xbox folks over the last year to get super profitable, get those profits up. And a large part of that is cost cutting. And that's why they've been making so many cuts. Some of them have been more quiet even. Like there have been a lot of cases of them not backfilling roles or them asking people to take buyouts. And that's been a little bit less, like a little bit more under the radar too, and also cutting down on travel expenses. A lot of those things that companies do. And it's like, hey, we're in belt tightening mode. So yes, within Xbox, it's definitely gone to lean times for those folks.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they announced like 650 people in early September. I think that was part of that. This has been a year of layoffs for every single video game company and a lot of tech companies too. This isn't just a Microsoft exclusive problem, but it's certainly a problem for a company that, I mean, within Microsoft, and this is something that we've been reporting on a few times at Bloomberg. So Xbox for a long time was given a lot of autonomy and been allowed to do its own thing. And then suddenly Xbox is like, hey, we want to spend $69 billion on Activision Blizzard. And that deal closes and Satyanandella and Amy Hood at Microsoft were like.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One dart that is constantly getting thrown at the board is layoffs, right? The way that they're making the revenue pay for itself is by making sure the costs are increasingly low, even as we're talking, there's Warnach notices being filed earlier this week. It's like 400 more people across three Activision Blizzard offices are going to be laid off. Is that going to slow down? Has this industry reached the end of this layoff cycle or were you going to see more of them?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These other kind of futuristic buzzwords that make investors happy. Whereas if you look at the numbers, it probably makes sense. But like the overall grand strategy, whatever. So Microsoft gets into mobile and maybe they make some money there. What does that mean for Xbox owners? What does that mean for the Xbox ecosystem? Who knows? Like it's all kind of throwing a bunch of darts at a board and like hoping a couple of em sticks.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't make any sense. They can't even be consistent in their messaging about which games will be exclusive to Xbox consoles and which games will be also released on PlayStation. They're changing their minds every few months, it seems. I don't know what they're thinking, and I don't know how it all fits in. I mean, from one point of view, it's like, well, this is going to make us a lot of money at some point. We will break even on this acquisition. So it was worth it on that front. We're making so much revenue from, wow, Call of Duty, King, maybe it's worth it. from a pure kind of math business perspective that carries some weight with me this idea i think ceos tend to think in these kind of grand strategy terms where it's like we must have a branch on mobile and then that's the way you appeal to investors right it's not by saying we are making more money than we did last year it's by saying here's our ai strategy and that's what boosts your stock 10 right so for them it's like we need to be talking about mobile and cloud and blah blah blah blah”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I ask that question is Microsoft felt for a minute like it was going to make a big bet on game streaming on cloud service or games. It would show up on TVs, on phones, whatever. They ran into whatever Apple App Store problems they ran into. We'll see how those regulatory fights play out. But that bet seems to have diminished. And so that now owning all the big studios for the big bet on how distribution will change seems like you're just holding a bag in a bunch of big studios in the second place console. Do you think that bet's going to pay off? Do you think they walked away from it? Are they just biding their time?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking at the numbers, I mean, on recent Microsoft earnings, they've reported that any growth in the Xbox business essentially has been attributed to Activision Blizzard, that part of it. So it's not just King that is giving them growth. If you're forward thinking, you might be like, well, mobile's the future, which I mean, I think that's arguable. And mobile has a tendency to be concentrated the top games are making the most money and for everybody else. It's much harder to penetrate. But yeah, I mean, definitely a big part of it. King was definitely the kind of the quiet money maker that came along for the ride.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it makes sense. It's true that they didn't have presence on mobile. They wanted to put together an Xbox mobile store. They wanted to compete on as many fronts as possible because, yes, I believe that PlayStation 5 has outsold it twofold at this point, PlayStation 5 being the biggest rival to the new Xbox. And so they're not in a position where they can compete on that front. So yes, it definitely makes sense that they would want King. I certainly don't think it was just about King, obviously having Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. Those are two pretty substantial... Revenue drivers for a company like”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We ran out to that. At the time, Phil Spencer was on the show, and he basically made the case they wanted to buy King because all the regulators are looking at Call of Duty. Are you going to make Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox? And Microsoft was like, no. And Phil pretty loudly was like, we need the Candy Crush money. That's what I want. We have no presence in mobile. We've already lost this generation. We don't know what's going to happen in the next one. We need a presence in mobile on Brian King. Did that ever hold water with you?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The entire video game industry was just so short sighted. It's pretty wild. They made this massive purchase. I think they saw an opportunity. Activision Blizzards market cap had fallen pretty hard. I think they went from a high of like over $100 per share to something like seventy, maybe even $65 at the point that they were ultimately purchased by Microsoft. It seemed like a good move, I suppose, to Microsoft at the time and it fit into their strategy of just looking around and saying, hey, we haven't been able to compete with these other big game companies by making games ourselves. So we're just going to gobble up everything and try to make games with other people's talent. Whether or not that was a successful acquisition, I think still remains to be seen.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and one of the biggest in business history, certainly the biggest in video game history. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty titanic. I think Phil Spencer at Microsoft, he had spent a long years just gobbling up studios. They had bought Bethesda a few years earlier, another substantial big game publisher. For him, this was like a big coup to be like, we're going to get everything. We're going to be like Thanos with his Infinity Stones and gobble up the entire video game industry. And I think he saw a moment of weakness at Activision and decided to jump in and Bobby Kartic, after he got the call, he started calling other companies and was like, hey, would you guys outbid them? But nobody was interested. Only Xbox wanted to do it. This was also a time end of 2021, beginning of 2022, when interest rates were incredibly low and borrowing money was cheap and like the economic climate was much different than it was even a year later. So that was also, that also played a role.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just have everybody on Call of Duty here. And that was a point of contention for a very, very long time because Blizzard was not able to speed up development of WOW expansions. Activision said throw people at the problem, hire hundreds of people and make that work. Blizzard said, no, that doesn't work for us, and on and on the battle continued. And then the same sort of thing happened with Overwatch. After that took off. Blizzard is trying to make a sequel. Activision was like, throw more people at the problem. Blizzard was like, no, we don't want to do that. And on and on, the battles went.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why don't you just move everybody to the WOW team? Why don't you put thousands of people on the WOW team? And Blizzard would be like, no, we want people experimenting with new things. We want to give our talent agency in deciding what they want to do. And Activision was like, what? Well, that doesn't make sense.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny you say that because I think an argument at Blizzard all the time that people like Morheim and his C suite would make is if we delay a game, one of the reasons we're part of this massive company is so like something else can help fill this slotter. Like you guys can save the quarter this year and then maybe we can save the quarter next year and that sort of thing. But that was a difficult argument to make to the Activision bosses because they had all sorts of charts and numbers and reasons that Blizzard was failing. There was a lot of just talk about Blizzard failing to deliver on fans expectations, failing to live up to what fans hope for. The biggest point of contention, I think, was over World of Warcraft and how World of Warcraft expansions each took two years to make. And that drove the Activision people crazy because Blizzard would say we would love to speed up the canence of this. People love expansions. We want to get one going every single year. And they tried all sorts of things to make that happen. And Activision people would say, well,”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this culture clash between Activision and Blizzard. It seems like Activision sort of wins along the way they buy King, which makes Candy Crush. Once you have that... Diversification Shouldn't the pressure come down? Like literally candy crush whales exist. That is the biggest piece of Apple services revenue outside of the Google search deal. Shouldn't that bring down the temperature and say, okay, you can make some”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shareholders and quarters to hit, and we have a plan. And if you tell us this game is going to be out on this date and then you fail to deliver, that screws us over because our investors don't like that and our stock might take. So it's really this fundamental divide that comes to a head with Morheim's resignation and from there activision really starts taking over.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the kind of activision mentality is like commercial takes priority over development. We see games as products. We want them to be great. We want people to love them, but we also want them to be on a predictable schedule coming out every year. And Blizzard is like the opposite. Remember, from the beginning, Blizzard had been like, you give us time, we want time to spend on this art. Critics of Blizzard would be like, hey, you guys are really abusing that notion because nowadays, by this point, mid-2010s, like around 2018, they've been working on projects, obviously Titan was a big one. That was like six years in development. They've been taking a lot of time, like more time than some of these games probably needed to take, especially now that they were entering the world of mobile, which generally takes a lot faster than Blizzard at Blizzard and mobile game might take four or five, six years in other companies, it could take six months. Blizzard people would argue, well, that's how we make the best games in the world. That's why we've never released a bad game. Activision people would be like, yeah, but we got.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bobby Codick way, which is to treat video game franchises as, in his words, products to be exploited, quote unquote. And what that means is everything needs to come out once a year at minimum. More than once a year, ideally, but at a minimum once a year. And you look at all the franchises that Activision has had, and that has been their strategy. Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Skylanders, and most of all Call of Duty. Call of Duty is the only one it's worked for. All the others just died unceremoniously, but because it works so well with Call of Duty,”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lately, but like basically that you guys need to preserve our independence, which it seems like Activision is not interested in doing. Activision very much wants to come in and make everybody work the Activision way. And so the Activision way, I think I should back up and explain here for a second, is”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why can't we treat these games like diapers and soap and detergent and just ship them and start a new factory to make more of them? He has never made games before. Like he comes in with a very different perspective. He doesn't really understand video game fans. And he tries. He spends a little bit of time playing World of Warcraft. He like tries to get it, but he just rubs people the wrong way within Blizzard. And at the same time as that's happening, Activision is applying more pressure from above on the Blizzard executive circle. And it all really, it really starts hitting ahead around 2017, 2018 to the point where Mike Morheim, who is this beloved CEO of Blizzard and the co-founder of the company, he resigns and he writes a letter, an email to Bobby Kodik towards the end of things. I got a hold of him quoted from in the book. He's like, hey, we need to set boundaries between activision Blizzard and Blizzard, between the parent company and us, because you guys are like interfering with our operations. And he says, way more political.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you did it, and you failed. You threw $80 million into a furnace. So we can't give you that same level of autonomy anymore. And he didn't directly say this, but it became clear in the coming months and years that as the pressures started, that Activision began to feel like Blizzard was failing. Suddenly, Activision is looking over and they're like, hey, we need to get some adults in the room here. And what they wind up doing is they have Blizzard hire a new CTO and a new CFO. And for the CFO position, they wind up recommending this guy who, so Bobby Kodic has this second in command Thomas Tipple and Thomas Tipple knows this guy from his days at Procter& Gamble named Armin Zerza and Armin Zerza comes in as the new blizzard CFO and he is not somebody that a lot of blizzard folks get along with because he comes in and he's like”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Play nice kind of tracks the history like the rise of Bobby Kodak and the history of Activision, we could work well together and also Activision is really good on consoles. We're a PC gaming company. This is actually a really good potential relationship and it is for a while. For a few years things go really well. Blizzard is firing on all cylinders. Wow is growing every single year and things seem to be going quite well. Blizzard always delivered on that promise for 20 years they deliver on the promise of you leave us alone, you give us time, you let us delay the games a few times and we will get you hits no matter what. And that changed in 2013 when they canceled this project called Titan that was promised as the successor to World of Warcraft. And when Titan was canceled, that changed everything for the company because then Activision Blizzard run by Bobby Code could look over and be like, hey, you promised us that you would deliver nonstop hits if we let you have all the independence and autonomy that you wanted.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sort of thing, you know, as the cycle continues. Basically, Vivendi wound up in a ton of debt, billions in debt, and was just facing all sorts of problems. And there were like rumors and that news every year about how they were in trouble and they were going to sell the games division. And it was really just not pleasant to be there, to be part of Blizzard because you're just like, man, this sucks. We're making all this cool stuff. And like, we have no idea what's going to happen to our company. At one point, Mike Morheim and his executive crew even talked about like, can we buy out Blizzard? What would that look like? which is a fun little alternate history speculation there. But anyway, so 2007 is when Vivendi Games announced they're going to merge with Activision. So it's not a buyout. It's a merger and it becomes Activision Blizzard because Blizzard is like the crown jewel of Avendi games. At the time, it seemed like a really good fit. And I think from the blizzard side, it was like, okay, we've gone through all this corporate turmoil. Here is Activision. They're one of the most successful video game companies on the planet.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After the sending to Backel back in 1998, Blizzard wound up getting sold to this company called Vivendia, a French water company, which again, going from a mail order catalog company to like this merger with a health company to a French utilities company, they're just like, what is going on here? So they're part of Vivendi for a little while. Vivendi winds up with this games division, Vivendi Games. This was back when they were also involved in Universal, so Vivendi had this whole entertainment strategy. Then their CEO got in all sorts of trouble for mispropriation of funds.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last time in the history of the company where it wasn't constantly under pressure to compromise on its creative ideals to make a set of new owners more money. So Activision shows up. Why sell attack division?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there are people who stayed there for 20 plus years. That causes a couple problems. One is that if you're kind of a problematic or borderline problematic person, you're kind of entrenched in the company. And it's kind of like, oh, he is the creepy uncle, whatever. That guy's just being that guy. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect, and this, I think, is the most kind of insidious, is that a lot of those people who are entrenched in the company and at the highest levels of the company are men because that's who was there at Blizzard in the 90s. So if you're a woman coming into Blizzard and say 2004 and you're like, oh, I love video games. I grew up playing Warcraft. I'm going to come work at Blizzard. This is really cool. It's hard to see a path to promotion and making your way up. And there are a lot of barriers that are in your way because the company is run by men and that has never changed. Blizzard has been around for almost 34 years now. And to this day, the company has never had a female creative director on one of its games, which is a crazy fact.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tenure is really valued above a lot of other things. Tenure really matters a blizzard. If you're like people used to say, oh, you've only been here for five years. You don't know. You don't know Blizzard, right?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's both. I think there are a couple of things that are specific to Blizzard. I mean, first and foremost, Blizzard over the years became so beloved that when in 2021 California sued Activision Blizzard for sexual misconduct and discrimination and a lot of the allegations were about Blizzard, the reason it resonated so strongly, I think, is because Blizzard was so beloved that people were like, oh my God, like come on, Blizzard, we love Blizzard. It'd be like workplace misconduct allegations coming out in Nintendo. It's like one of the most beloved gaming companies on the planet. So that was a big part of it. I think, yeah, a lot of companies were like this in the 90s. Some changed, some evolved, some didn't, some really struggled to. I think it's really difficult for a company to change its culture.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a lot of hints about this in sort of the early chapters of the book, there's stories about looking at porn in the office and it being a boys club and basically men being men in an office unchecked by the cultural norms.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The early days, it was especially an issue because a lot of people during various stages of Blizzard's history felt like they weren't being paid appropriately. They weren't getting rewarded for all the crazy hours they were putting in. But the kind of the culture of sexism and discrimination that would bubble up and be talked about much later, I think that was a bigger problem that was kind of rooted in that 90s culture.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think Blizzard got better at Crunch over time. I think the more deeper-setted issue was that from the beginning, Blizzard was almost entirely men and felt like working there felt like being at a frat house. And I think that had its pros and its cons for the people who worked there. But if you're a woman who came in and worked there, it was super complicated. And you had to try to fit into the boys' club, or you might feel uncomfortable. And there might be all sorts of problems that you run into if you work there as a woman. And those were the sorts of things that would then bubble up later, especially as people started getting rich and famous because of World of Warcraft, which really transformed the company. And then some of that, some of the kind of the combination of that geekdom combined with fame and fortune turned some people into self-proclaimed rock stars and made them do some awful things. That, I think, was more of an issue that kind of lasted than the crunch thing. I think crunch is definitely an issue for a lot of people.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the thing that I'm focused on it feels like you start a company, it's a bunch of people who want to work together, your first hundred or your first thousand employees, that's their whole lives. And then you build a culture around working 24-7 with your friends. And that thing is inherently unscalable. Your next hundred or your next thousand employees might have their own lives. And so then demanding that they worked as hard as that initial wave of people who chose this life leads just sort of inexorably to weird labor issues and weird culture issues. Is that your read on Blizzard?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they formed this company called Sendant. And then suddenly one day everybody wakes up to this press release from the SCC saying that Sendant was engaged in widespread fraud. And they're like, wait a minute, that's not good. And it turns out Sendant is cooking the books. Their CEO, Walter Forbes, goes to jail, prosecuted by Chris Chrissy of all people. That's the type of thing that would just happen to their corporate parents in the 90s. It's a miracle that they were able to make any games, like with the distractions and the craziness that was happening above them”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As they were a little bit later, and also their executive team, Mike Moorheim, Alan Adham, Paul Sams, who came in a little bit later, they were all really good at shielding the company from corporate pressures and saying, hey, if you just leave us alone and let us do what we want, we will make you hits. So a lot of the crunch was really, it was either self-imposed or kind of imposed from Blizzard's executive layer rather than their corporate parents, at least at the time. For a long time, they were able to deliver on that promise and really mollify their corporate parents despite having to go through turmoil. One of the craziest stories in the book is about Sendant, which was their parent company. So in 1996, Davidson and Associates sold their company in a CUC, which was a mail order catalog company. And then a couple years later, CUC merges with HFS, which is a healthcare company. Of course. It's all just nuts. And everyone's like, what is going on here?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT