Often times, it’s easy to say that “people change jobs all the time”. The problem at Blizzard Entertainment however is that the ones who are leaving, are long timers (ones who would normally be considered as “lifers” had the wheels not continue to fall off since the bleeding began with original executives like Rob Pardo in 2014 and Chris Metzen in 2016 to name a few including co-founders like Pearce and Morhaime, flying the coop over the past 5 years).
Now, long time designer David Kim (SC2, Diablo IV, and recently WoW Shadowlands) left the company after 14 years a few days ago and today, Overwatch director and long time World of Warcraft lead designer Jeff Kaplan, called it a day (after 19 years).
Blizzard Entertainment has not been the same company it was for at least 5+ years now. And that pace accelerated once Mike Morhaime resigned as CEO (where even then, the writing was on the wall since Blizzard was excruciatingly slow to delve into mobile gaming where some of their IP’s would’ve made sense early on where they wouldn’t have left so much revenues and profits on the table). The very public mess up with Diablo Immortal’s announcement (at the wrong venue) and the very public backlash by large portions of the normally very loyal Blizzard community, were the signs of the crack in Blizzard Entertainment’s mostly pristine brand. Myself, I made it very clear in this blog in 2015, that I was no longer a guarantee sale (after having been one of those loyal collectors edition type of customer since the mid-90’s).
This part of the Activision Blizzard holding company has continued to lose established personnel as more pressure is exerted to see the sort of results that do not mesh with the subsidiaries desire to “ship it when it’s ready”. And even though the company continues to make record operating revenues and profits, that has been offset by continued layoffs including the most recent one (March 2021) in their European offices (this is the inevitable trimming of the prior hubris that had infected the company for a decade starting from the mid-2000’s during that period when gaming companies in general were being acquired at hyper-inflated rates where the higher level execs made bank once they were vested).
While the PR with these layoffs have been about them not affecting their development teams, one cannot deny that part of the hubris and arrogance is very well deep in their design teams (way too much “chip on the shoulder” sort of arrogance) that is now at odds with some of the newer realities of the desire for faster and more agile development cycles; something that contradicts Blizzard Entertainments mantra of “shipping it when it’s ready” or “not being afraid to cancel a title”. These may have been good when there were a lot more shields including two-thirds of the co-founders being there to push back. I think those times are gone (where they can just throw resources at a concept that gets iterated on, but never faces any accountability when product never ends up shipping).
Allen Adham while being a co-founder, stepped away from Blizzard in 2004 until his return in 2016 (that’s enough time away to develop an outsiders vision which can be both good and bad). But Blizzard Entertainment is like this huge ship now where corporate inertia means it takes awhile for decisions to make their impacts felt. We’re seeing some of that creeping to the surface with these departures of long time personnel. We’re not seeing it in the cadence of releases though; some of that was an impact by the early uncertainty brought on by COVID-19 (which many companies including Blizzard, have adapted to). That pressure is going to begin again this year (to deliver more games based on their IP’s across various platforms); the quality of said products will be the biggest question mark and only be known once they ship.
Nonetheless, I doubt the bleeding will stop (and is likely a necessity in order to get more new blood into the company regardless if it is a good or bad thing; time will tell).
