Another long time high profile executive has exited stage right from Blizzard Entertainment; this time, it is Blizzard president and CEO Mike Morhaime (he will continue to serve as a special advisor) which comes just a few weeks before BlizzCon 2018. Morhaime was one of Blizzard’s co-founders (when it was known as Silicon & Synapse in 1991). Long time senior vice president and World of Warcraft executive producer J. Allen Brack will take over as president.
In recent years, Blizzard has seen the exodus of some of its original executives including Rob Pardo in 2014, Chris Metzen in 2016, and many more in the senior management ranks (game directors and executive/senior producers) like Alex Mayberry (WoW and Diablo III), Josh Mosquiera (Diablo III), Nick Carpenter (WoW and Diablo III), Ben Brode (Hearthstone), and Hamilton Chu (Hearthstone) amongst the more notable ones.
A common theme with many of these departures is burn out from the vicious cycle of trying to keep producing along with morale issues in some areas of the company (Metzen alluded to this when discussing the failure of Project Titan). What these folks also don’t outwardly mention is the changing culture of the company as time has passed. Project Titan was their last major cancellation (which wasn’t out of the oridinary when it came to Blizzard making those decisions). As the game industry landscape has changed though, so has Blizzard’s own “we’ll ship only when its ready” mantra.
There really is now a pressure to not throwaway development time and to meet tight production and release schedules. The upcoming new Diablo title is under similar pressure ever since job postings began showing up in 2015; many will end up being surprised at how aggressive the launch schedule will be for this title once Blizzard begins discussing details of the next game (which as I noted before, would begin in the 2nd half of 2018). While not specifically related to main subject of this entry, I also thought I would quickly post about Diablo and BlizzCon 2018.
Where Blizzard’s marketing seems to be making a change is the lack of teaser material heading into BlizzCon 2018 (choosing instead to “obfuscate that aspect” behind the Nintendo Switch announcement). This years BlizzCon has Diablo on the main stage after the keynote which indicates a major announcement. Part of this might reveal a strategic shift with the new game where they may shift away from the limited co-op nature of the franchise and follow a path similar to Torchlight Frontiers and building on an expanded Battle.net Town concept that David Brevik noted before (a feature they had to drop for Diablo II).
I’ve personally always doubted Blizzard would depart from this particular vision for the franchise but the industry continues to change when it comes to monetizing these titles with an ongoing revenue source. D3’s RMAH attempt turned into a design failure and the game was never really designed to have an alternative revenue source besides expansions (the micro transaction changes made were specifically for the Chinese version).
Former StarCraft II lead designer/balancer David Kim left that team and joined “Team 3” (the Diablo team) in January 2017. Besides actual skill balancing, part of this could be investigating actual PvP systems that would make more sense in a shared world (aka MMO-ARPG) game environment. Blizzard is also heavily pushing e-Sports so this is something else they were probably looking into (there is also a good chance they conclude that Diablo’s RNG roots would be too compromised with systems that can be balanced properly for e-Sports).
Digressing, Morhaime probably felt it was a good time to pass the helm on to someone that was not an original founder (where nostalgia and keeping with the old traditions can hold one back from really looking outside the box). But I’m not going to deny there are higher level pressures to meet production and launch deadlines as all of this gets wrap up in quarterly estimates by Wall Street. Now, he can spend more time with his family as well as have the constant pressure lifted with his new advisory role.
