Jason Schreier’s ‘Play Nice’: The Monstrous Evolution Of Blizzard Is A Fascinating Ride

Author of Blood, Sweat and Pixels and Press Reset, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier is back with yet another deep dive into the industry, this time focused on one of its most storied companies, Blizzard Entertainment.

Out today, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment spans the entire history of the company including a “break point” when “Old Blizzard” became “New Blizzard,” though Schreier says that’s not where you’d think.

As a frequent player of most of Blizzard’s catalogue, the book was an excellent read. It did everything from make me wish Blizzard made a Star Wars RTS to feel empathy for Diablo 3 scapegoat Jay Wilson.

Of course the subject matter is as relevant as ever in the wake of the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and as that’s only spooling up, it’s briefly touched on. The future under Microsoft is an unwritten chapter but everything up until this point is fascinating to read, though sometimes tragic with the company’s recently unearthed treatment of women.

Any fan of Blizzard games at any point in the company’s lifespan would be well to read Play Nice, and to get a bit more into it, I sat down with Schreier recently to ask him about some specifics.

How long does something like this take to write?

SCHREIER: Well, the book took about three years to report and write. I would say the reporting takes the majority of the time. Bloomberg was very generous and gave me three months of book leave to sit and write the thing. The reporting took a lot longer than that just because I spoke to 350 plus people for the book. Very time consuming.

There are an endless amount of big gaming companies, so why did you think you wanted to pick Blizzard specifically?

There are a few reasons. It’s true that there are endless numbers of gaming companies, but few are as storied and are as interesting and inspire as many strong emotional reactions as Blizzard. In fact, I would say that they and Nintendo are probably the only two companies that have achieved what they have with that. There are no other companies in the world that have not just had one hit franchise, but five multibillion dollar franchises, franchises that are beloved and inspire fan fiction and sequels and spin-offs and costumes. And how many other gaming companies have their own conventions dedicated just to them? It’s pretty wild, so those things Blizzard have done are the seeds for this book.

Was there something kind of specific that you found out about the origins of Blizzard during the research, something that you didn’t know when you were starting?

There were some a mix of big things and little things, like little details that have never been reported that I had no idea about. So for example, the fact that Blizzard was briefly flirting with making a Star Wars RTS game, and that was before they started making StarCraft. It was kind of like, hey, we got this deal with Lucas to do Star Wars. Ohh actually it’s not happening. Who knows how real that was, but hey, well, we have this this sci-fi thing. Might as well do our own new sci-fi RTS game. Little details.

One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is about the Blizzard folks back in 1996, when Warcraft 2 came out, they knew they really made it because they got a customer service call and it was this guy calling to ask about some bug or something, and then his wife got on the phone and was like, are you on the phone with that stupid company? That game is why we don’t have sex anymore. People got a kick out of that to the point where they kept playing the recording of it on the office intercom over and over.

And then of course, there’s also kind of more negative stories and anecdotes as well that that surprised me that I get into in the book. But yeah, so many things made me think holy crap, I can’t wait for people to read this and see all of these wild stories.

What’s your favorite Blizzard game?

I would say StarCraft 2 is the game that I have played the most and love the most. It used to be Diablo 2. Diablo 2 was my thing. When I was a teenager and I had nothing else to do but hang out in my parent’s attic.

Same, yeah.

It’s like if you’re a millennial in your mid 30s, you’ve probably spent a lot of time playing Diablo 2 back in the day, but StarCraft 2 really resonated with me. That was the game where I started playing it as my career as a video game reporter was starting. The beta came out at the beginning of 2010…I started watching videos from Day9 that showed you how to play and how to get good at it and that became my game that I was good at and just stuck to for years and years and years. It’s still a game I revisit every once in a while, and just kind of play one-on-one online with people, so StarCraft 2 is definitely my favorite.

Well, too bad they can’t monetize RTS games anymore, so we’ll see if it ever returns.

It is too bad they can’t seem to. They can’t seem to get other StarCraft projects off [the ground] either.

Is there a moment or kind of inflection point that when you think “Old Blizzard” became “New Blizzard”?

Yes. And I think my answer is probably different than your average Blizzard fan’s answer, because my answer is that Blizzard changed irrevocably and completely the day that November in 2004 with World of Warcraft. That was the day the Blizzard changed entirely. Because when World of Warcraft came out and then it wound up exploding and reaching 5 million players within a year, which was beyond the even most optimistic projections of anyone at the company. When that happened, Blizzard, almost overnight, turned from a company of hundreds of people into a company of thousands of people to keep up with the demand. Customer service and the community management and all the other stuff that they needed, they started BlizzCon, they moved to their big campus in Irvine, they merged with Activision, it set them on this path of growth and transformed them into an entirely different company, which had so many different repercussions, both positive and negative.

That’s a good answer. I did think you were going to say the Activision merger. I’m sure that’s probably one of the more common answers.

Blizzard was owned by Vivendi and Vivendi Games merged with Activision in 2007. For the first few years of that merger, nothing really changed or happened differently. It was only really a little bit later, closer to 2013, that the pressure from Activision started to come on Blizzard executives, and that didn’t really even manifest on lower levels until much, much later. After that, closer to 2017/2018, so almost 10 years after the merger is really when it started having the biggest impact on people on the ground level at Blizzard.

If we’re doing spoilers, what was one of the most kind of surprising revelations you found over the course of writing the book?

Oh man, like, there’s so many. There’s so many things that surprised me. I know you’re Diablo guy, so getting to sit down with Jay Wilson for a while, the director of Diablo 3, and hearing his story about the kind of emotional breakdown that he went through and him really opening up about his his struggles in the wake of Diablo 3, becoming the internet’s punching bag, that was really interesting to hear. I was certainly surprised by some of the details about the corporate drama between Activision and Blizzard. That was another interesting one. Really everything. I mean, there’s so much in there, like every game that Blizzard made has some interesting kind of twist or story behind it that I think people don’t know about or maybe kind of tangentially saw years ago.

What was a Blizzard game that got killed that you would have actually wanted to see released?

The one that I heard the most about and this book is reporting on this for the first time is a game called Avalon. And Avalon was supposed to be Blizzard’s take on Minecraft, kind of the Warcraft spin on Minecraft and a better comparison might be Dragon Quest Builders. It’s got more story and is more of an RPG. I think that was part of the idea of Avalon as well. I heard from a couple of people who were like “this game was so cool, man.”

Gamers and also journalists and critics and people who just observe the video game industry tend to romanticize cancelled games, and I think there’s a good reason for that because cancelled games exist in in amber, perfectly preserved, never to come out and reveal their flaws to us. There are a lot of times where we’re like, oh, man, I wish that had come out. And if it had come out, it might have been terrible. So I do think there’s something fun about the romanticization of these canceled games because they can never come out and disappoint us.

We could live in a parallel universe where Project Titan was the biggest game on the planet.

As a project it sounded interesting as kind of a novelty, but as a player it didn’t sound up my alley

In terms of the Xbox situation now and just sort of the Old Blizzard versus New Blizzard thing, when separated out from Activision and Call of Duty, if it’s standing with it’s just current existing franchises, would you consider Blizzard healthy at this point? Obviously, it might not be in its glory days, but do you think it’s healthy or is it still sort of on the decline?

I mean from a business perspective, I don’t think Blizzard has ever not been profitable. I think there’s a question of whether those profits have grown and grown consistently enough for some like Bobby Kotick, we don’t have numbers of them anymore. Activision Blizzard every year used to publish breakdowns that was like here is our revenue and profit for each division. Here’s Activision’s. Here’s Blizzard’s. Here’s Kings. And that was very helpful in that you could see Blizzard’s trajectory and that is no longer the case. Microsoft doesn’t do that.

Do you think going over this whole story of Blizzard’s history now, do you think anything from the past might be predictive about the future of Microsoft?

I don’t know because Xbox is such a big question mark. I think you and I have both written a bit about how baffling their current moves are and even people who run the division know what they’re doing or what’s going to happen in the coming years, I mean, their decisions this year have been just incomprehensible, so it’s hard to know what they’re going to do with Blizzard.

Thanks to Jason for speaking to me. Play Nice is out today.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.