For obvious reasons, there are key differences between the gaming world we have now and the gaming world that was around in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. One of the key differences is the kind of “culture” that can be found within gaming companies. In the early days of gaming, those who came together to create dev teams, from top to bottom, were filled with gamers and enthusiasts. They wanted to make the best games possible. One of those people was Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime, who, along with a roommate of his, made a titan of gaming that is still around today.
By his own admission, when he joined the company with his roommate, there were people there because they wanted to make great games. However, as revealed in his new book, Play Nice: The Rise And Fall Of Blizzard Entertainment, which Bloomberg got a first look at, he could tell when things were starting to fall apart, and a key reason for that was certain “business-minded hires,” including former CEO Bobby Kotick, who came on after the Activision merger.
When Activision made a key cancelation within the company, they then inserted CFO Armin Zerza to try and “keep costs in check,” even though it wasn’t Morhaime and his team that cost the company so much money.
“Before Zerza, the company was run by Blizzard lifers and video game enthusiasts, but the CFO brought a completely different mindset,” Schreier noted in his book, adding that the dev team would mock the new hire because of his “inability to understand the video game industry.”
But Bobby Kotick was the one who drew the ire of the co-founder the most, including stating that only the “most profitable teams” should get bonuses instead of everyone who worked at the company, which Morhaime was against.
At one point, he wrote a long letter to Kotick noting:
“I believe that preserving Blizzard’s culture and magic is a necessity for preserving Activision Blizzard’s advantage of having an organization that can attract and retain the best creative talent in the world and that can consistently produce the highest quality games and experiences. It has been increasingly hard for me to provide Blizzard leadership and staff confidence that Blizzard has a stable future.”
Sure enough, he resigned in 2018, and not long after that, Bobby Kotick and Activision as a whole came under fire for the “frat culture” they apparently instilled in Morhaime’s company after he was gone. Kotick wouldn’t leave until Microsoft bought out the company in 2023.
