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Blizzard cofounder launches new gaming endeavor Dreamhaven

381 points by raimue 6y ago

jimbob45 6y ago
https://imgur.com/XwyReNw https://imgur.com/XwyReNw The above is a fairly interesting flowchart detailing where all of the core employees moved on to after leaving Blizzard. Some have met success, most have folded. To me, the only employee that ever mattered was Chris Metzen. He was the one who developed the core of all of their stories and personally approved every quest in WoW. If you're going to try to get players to emotionally connect to characters and story arcs, I would think that the writer would be the best place to figure out how.
- moomin 6y ago
  Disagree, the greatest story in the world won't save bad mechanics. I mean, Dark Souls has a lore people obsess about, but there's plenty of people with an emotional attachment to it with absolutely no clue what's going on.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    A good example is Elex. It's got a good world/story, fun factions, it looks pretty good, exploration is interesting and fun. But the combat is horrific. Balancing is terrible. You'll find high level enemies right next to low level ones. The actual gameplay is so bad. And you'll see it repeated over and over on the reviews on the steam page. Some people claim it gets better if you stick with it, and I did because I was playing it over a holiday. My experience was they're wrong, it never gets better.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    Likewise, interesting and fun mechanics don't necessarily create a fun game. Take EVE Online. I love the ideas of the game. There are no rules (As long as you're not hacking/cheating) to what players can do. You can scam people. You can kill noobs (Though if you're in high-security space, you'll be instagibbed by CONCORD, essentially the space police). And the fact that losing your ship means its GONE means there's always a demand for crafted goods. Skills are learned over time whether you're playing or not, so you don't need to grind. But...the actual gameplay is boring as hell [0]. [0] https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=66 https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=66
    - moomin 6y ago
      (ALWP) I mean, obviously plenty of people do love Eve Online, but the micro-mechanics shown in the video are awful. Compare to Dark Souls (again) where pretty much every combat is interesting (and has better be because you’re gonna redo it a lot until you crack it). OTOH, I found the mechanics of the recent Spider-Man game kind of fun, but the macro game is just endless repetition. Which feels true of a lot of AAA games these days.
      - pdimitar 6y ago
        The PS4 Spiderman is a gorgeous game with amazing combat and parkour! Me and my wife both cringed really hard to the repetitiveness and the blandness of the characters however. Tons of plot inconsistencies!
        moomin 6y ago
        Grief, yes, I found it ridiculously hard to actually care about the characters. They should have had a plot where the villain was sucking all of the interesting out of people. Just travelling through the city was way more fun.
- zacharycohn 6y ago
  The name text in that image is too small to read..
  - fareesh 6y ago
    Open the image in a new tab then you can zoom-in as much as you want. imgur is not showing the full zoomed in version
- BossingAround 6y ago
  > If you're going to try to get players to emotionally connect to characters and story arcs, I would think that the writer would be the best place to figure out how. I was fairly attached to WoW while never paying much attention to the superficial stories and quests. I did at first, but it honestly wasn't great from what I remember (the first WoW), and so I just focused on the gameplay and team work rather than the story. Personally, I read books for the story, and play games for the mechanics.
  - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
    I would just play WoW focusing on similar things to you and then watch a youtube video for the lore :)
- xenihn 6y ago
  How involved was he with Diablo 2? I don't know specifics, but I was disappointed by everything in Diablo 3, including the story, and I think that's due to the lack of the Blizzard North people.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Caveat emptor: Flowchart is from 2011. Runic Games, for example, folded, and the Schaeffer brothers parted ways. Max founded Etchra. Otherwise informative, thanks for linking.
- throwawaynothx 6y ago
  I played wow in korean without being able to read any of the quests. just to have my warlock pet names in korean. story is not a big part of wow. ffxiv however..
- nkrisc 6y ago
  How old is this? Under Carbine Studios it says unnamed MMO but I have to imagine that is Wildstar and this is just very old.
  - delinquenz 6y ago
    The chart says April 2011
markbnine 6y ago
Me thinks they used the Fantasy Place Name generator. . . https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/fantasy-town-names.php https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/fantasy-town-names.php
- mk_chan 6y ago
  I love that website! I use it all the time to get some inspiration for my hobby project names
- onychomys 6y ago
  I just hope they don't hire a bunch of lawyers and go after Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis: http://dreamhavenbooks.com http://dreamhavenbooks.com
- bovermyer 6y ago
  Unrelated anecdote - the person that develops that site is part of a community of generator website creators. We build all kinds of fun tools like that.
  - swarnie_ 6y ago
    Out of interest is the reddit username generator written by someone in that community? (https://perchance.org/reddit-username https://perchance.org/reddit-username) Its my go-to place when i need another 30-40 accounts.
    - debaserab2 6y ago
      Why do you need 30-40 reddit accounts?
      - swarnie_ 6y ago
        I like messing about with bots and auto-posting. Lots of subreddits have restrictions based on karma and account age. Mass creating in batches seemed the easiest answer.
jagger27 6y ago
Those are some pretty big names. The gaming industry has shown over and over how smaller companies fight toe-to-toe with giant companies if they produce games that people actually want to play. I wish them the best. Everyone loves an underdog.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Announcements of new companies like this are also the reason why I'm not as negative as some other people about the Bethesda acquisition. In the short term it might cause some more consolidation, but the whole gaming market is still growing and new independent studios are opening up, which counteracts the consolidation to some degree.
  - dyingkneepad 6y ago
    The problem with the Bethesda thing is that I won't get to play Doom Reboot 3 on PS5. I don't care about Xbox, heck I can't even differentiate the new model from the older one due to the confusing names.
    - _mkef 6y ago
      If you have a decent gaming PC Microsoft will still take care of you.
    - notSupplied 6y ago
      Given that the Doom Reboot is all about juggling an insane number of tasks at once you’re better off playing it on PC anyway. In fact I suspect this series is limiting its potential audience because the core play style of fast weapon switching just isn’t very viable on console.
Danieru 6y ago
In the interest of driving conversation away from nostalgia-ism let's talk about the economics of a high-tier game career. Morhaime has now left the company he helped found, and one he sold off eons ago. Now stepping into a new vessel he gets to sell a bit less equity this time around and bring along the cream of his leadership team. No doubt he funded the initial paperwork out of his own pocket, but soon accepted one of the flood of investment offers. It is an old play book yet no one talks about it when the play succeeds. Remember that falling out Martin O'Donnell had with Bungie? Did you notice how Martin moved on to found his own studio, one which successfully shipped a non-trivial game? Now not only does he get all the creative control he wanted, but even all of the financial upside. Video games are so successful even those people getting pushed out of the "golden castle" have the skills and connections to build their own castle. No doubt this would change if games were not such a quick growing industry, but we've maintained that growth for a couple decades now. This I think leads back to a fan favorite topic: unionization in games. For the opposite reason one might think: those successful enough to be "too important too lose" for studios are more likely setup new studios before they ever spend their political capital on unionization. This leaves the suits, who by definition are incapable of setting a studio, and the "bulk of the creative team". Hollywood could unionize because no matter how famous no star alone is capable of walking out the door to make a new studio. Thus the stars and more importantly directors saw the studios as overlords, not future peers. Games does not have that, and it is a core problem the games unionization movement needs to figure out a solution to.
- WarChortle 6y ago
  Actors make their own production studios all the time. That's why Hollywood unionized the way it did. A specific studio couldn't unionize because they would just get dissolved and reformed under a new LLC. No actor or famous game designer is capable of creating a AAA movie/game by themselves. They need a lot of people to work on it. The only difference is Hollywood the entire pool of workers unionized they have no choice but to hire a union worker. Game designers/programmers need to follow the same formula. The two industries have exactly the same problem, Hollywood workers have been around long enough to figure out the solution.
  - 6y ago
duxup 6y ago
Hopefully this works out. We see a lot of "core member of great thing founds own thing" and you really want to see them succeed but having an organization succeed takes a a lot of people with lots of different skills. I'm not convinced that any given jumble of highly talented folks actually produce something if we somehow ran a but of iterations of "jumble of highly talented folks". I've heard plenty of stories of such folks going their own way to be stopped by basic business type problems like project management, just managing people, maintaining focus, raising money and keeping investors happy, etc.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  Mike Morhaime was the president of blizzard for quite a while. He should be very familiar with the management side of things.
- username90 6y ago
  He founded Blizzard, he can probably do it again. I think he is the last of the early Blizzard people to go off on his own, so we'll see if the success was a fluke or if there is something special about him.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I really hope so. It just takes a lot of pieces to really make a thing.
- jib 6y ago
  They have a great group of people. I’ve worked with maybe 6-7 of them directly, and they’re all on my list of people I’d actively want to work with again, across a pretty wide set of skills. The ones I just know of are also people friends say are both great at their stuff and good to work with, so I have high hopes they’ll make some awesome stuff.
Thaxll 6y ago
Even with big names backing those studios, it's pretty hard to release good games from scratch and to last.
saberience 6y ago
As an ex-Blizzard engineer (left last year shortly after the 2019 layoffs) this makes so much sense to me. I saw Mike a few weeks before he announced his resignation and it was so obvious to me that he was super sad about leaving. Rumors were rife at the time that he was being "forced out" by Activision and I think that ended up being the case. Mike left Blizzard some months before the layoffs were announced and the general conclusion was that Mike was told by Bobby Kotick that he had to do the layoffs or leave Blizzard, and hence Mike ended up resigning. His resignation email said all the same stuff like "Mike wanting to spend more time with family" etc etc. But now it's fairly clear that was all crap, he still wanted to run a games company, he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard.
- jayd16 6y ago
  >he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard. I'm curious to hear some anecdotes about this. I've worked at an Activision studio and the central management mostly stayed out of the way. There were meetings and green lights and deadlines but it seemed pretty normal. We didn't see a lot of "corporate says X so change everything!" From my experience the studios have a lot of autonomy and Blizzard is even more in control of its own destiny.
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    The Blizzard of the past decade is nothing like the Blizzard of the 90s/2000s. They're a husk of their former selves.
  - summerlight 6y ago
    Or it might be the case where your reporting lines were able to do their job and keep you away from all the upper-level politics? I also used to work on online game companies and thought that we were given lots of autonomy like you until I found our director and producer fiercely fighting back against all the pressures coming from corporate and sales guys in executive level meetings. Because of this experience, I wouldn't take those autonomy for granted; Mike probably also had done the same thing more than 10 years and given up for some reasons.
deleted 6y ago
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mewse-hn 6y ago
As a veteran WoW player now playing classic, I hope this play works out. There was a ~40 min youtube video released a couple months ago that details the many ways contemporary Blizzard has lost their soul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg The short version is Blizzard is a shell of their former glory, and they are making decisions based on cash and appeasement of the Chinese govt. Most of you probably remember the Diablo: Immortal reception (Chinese mobile game presented as a keynote at the American, PC-playing blizzcon fan convention). I deeply hope Morhaime is able to recapture the lightning in a bottle that existed at old Blizzard, and this doesn't end up as another Hellgate: London fiasco.
- Snild 6y ago
  I loved Hellgate: London. The game definitely lacked polish (ran out of money, I assume), but the general gameplay feel was great.
  - jug 6y ago
    I agree and the timing was pretty poor for that game. Windows Vista was JUST out the door and the graphics card drivers were downright terrible at the time, often crashing. Reason being Vista used a completely new driver model (WDDM). I recall HGL also had some unfortunate memory leak issues. In general I think that game was largely hamstrung by performance issues for one reason or another. The idea of a FPS Action RPG like that wa as simple as it was brilliant. I've wondered why it hadn't been done before and still hasn't quite been done again. Games like Dark Souls exist but I don't think they're quite the same. Rumor is Diablo IV was going to go there but Blizzard later changed their mind, rather opting for a traditional isometric view. I think they lose a lot of immersion doing that. Imagine sneaking through damp, dark cellars and have demons lurk around the corners, and everything built upon a solid itemization system and replayability with randomized maps.
- md5person 6y ago
  > "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg" Content aside - I feel like this video is terribly edited, scripted and produced. It's impossible to follow - thanks to all the shallow jokes, weird cuts and messy presentation. Almost like it's intentionally made for people without an attention span...
munificent 6y ago
> Morhaime will act as CEO of Dreamhaven as a whole, which will be based in Irvine, California. It marks his first major move in the games industry since stepping down as Blizzard president in 2018 and leaving the company he helped create in 2019. Sounds like the typical expiration date for a non-compete, so I assume they've been planning to do this for some time. Let's hope it works out. In this era of constant consolidation, I'm always happy to see new companies spring up.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  It's in California, so non-competes were probably not the issue.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    In CA, non-competes are still valid against executives, founders, and any employee with a material share of the ownership of the company (for a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, a material share can be a fraction of a % of the total value of the company).
  - justinlloyd 6y ago
    A "non-compete" in California is very enforceable. Though not in the way that most people think of non-competes. "I will pay you $X, at $Y per month to not do that thing for the next $Z months. If you decide to do that thing before $Z months have elapsed, the money dries up. Also, the amount of money you receive each month increases with each passing month." I did a deal with my small company in 2008 where I sold IP. I personally agreed not to go and recreate that IP for at least 5 years, and for that, I would receive revenue share from the current IP. I also did a deal with a different small company I created at the tail end of 2016 whereby I received a cash payout with an attached clause of being sued into oblivion should I a) attempt to work with the client in some capacity for a period of time or b) talk about client so as not to jeopardise the in-place contracts. The company that acquired my company was interested in the contracts that my company had with a client, not the IP so much. Non-competes in California are very enforceable, but they usually come with money attached and are not used to bludgeon a Sandwich Artist from earning a living at the deli across the road.
Sawamara 6y ago
I have respect for Dustin Bowder's vision with regards to Diablo III, however disastrous it proved to be with the game's hardcore fans. It misunderstood what the franchise was about and fundamentally went against some of its core "values", but at the end of the day, pre-nerf Diablo III at Inferno was one of the most heavy skill-based kite-based arpg to date. You had to be there.
- bob1029 6y ago
  To me this hints at the core of why small/niche games will always have a place. Diablo 3 and any other mass-consumption AAA title is going to have to compromise some of the edginess to gain wider acceptance. I personally thought the D3 launch experience into the first few months was incredible. That said, I can see how it upset some of the fan base for various reasons. Overwatch is another example where you can see this battle unfold. There are now 2 completely separate competitive ranked queue options with different rule sets in order to bridge this gap in gameplay expectations. I personally prefer the unconstrained queue where more dynamic teamwork is required, but a lot of players prefer the role queue where they can expect certain meta styles. I think both are perfectly valid ways to play the game, and this approach might be a good example of ways we might be able to handle these varying expectations in a more general way.
- echohack5 6y ago
  I believe you mean Jay Wilson? Dustin Browder's involvement with Diablo 3 was only from a Strike Team perspective. Browder is more known for his work on Starcraft 2.
  - VRay 6y ago
    Man, I hope so Diablo 3's hardest difficulty at launch was a nightmare. You had to move around with Ninja Gaiden/Dark Souls-level precision in a game engine that just was _not_ designed to give you that much precise control So often I'd be trying to run out of something, accidentally click a monster instead of a patch of open ground, and my guy would stop to turn around and shoot. It was horrible Not only was it un-fun to play, it actively made me feel bad. "Hey, game's over, you're just not good enough to play any more Diablo. Get out."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
__s 6y ago
Morhaime showed up to HomeStory Cup (StarCraft II tournament) in 2019, & took part in their poker night: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/511760157?t=9h20m7s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/511760157?t=9h20m7s It lets you see him relaxing as a pretty chill guy. He really cares about creating good games One of the insightful remarks he made was that StarCraft was easier to balance than WarCraft because it had so much more asymmetry
- chrisco255 6y ago
  I hope at least one of these studios is working on an RTS.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Do you happen to know roughly where he comes in, or where the best parts are? I am scrubbing but it’s so long!
  - __s 6y ago
    9h20m7s. For the most part he's being a polite poker player by keeping his mouth shut. Tells a small story at 11h05m30s
    - 1123581321 6y ago
      Thank you!
zemo 6y ago
I hope they replicate the high level of product quality that Blizzard was shipping from 1995 to 2012 but not the thing where they're infamous in the game industry for underpaying people.
lorthemar 6y ago
I'm really glad to hear this. Morhaime, Bowder, and all deserve to create games that they feel attached to. Just grab Samwise and Metzen so we can go back to the 2000s :)
manas1 6y ago
sdcsvx
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://www.ign.com/articles/mike-morhaime-new-company-blizzard-dreamhaven-secret-door-moonshot https://www.ign.com/articles/mike-morhaime-new-company-blizz..., which points to this. There's also https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-morhaime-blizzard-dreamhaven/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-m....
dang 6y ago
Another original source on this appears to be https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-morhaime-blizzard-dreamhaven/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-m....
jug 6y ago
Interesting! I think Morhaime retained a lot of the "Blizzard spirit" that many feel has been lost in recent years. In a sense, Morhaime leaving Blizzard felt like the transition to the new "Activision-Blizzard" model was now finally complete. Something more than Morhaime alone left Blizzard that day and it felt terrible to watch Blizzcon and not really see a happy man. It was apparently Morhaime who gave us Diablo 3 fans the scraps of the cancelled second expansion as free content update as pure fan service. Without these and the concepts they introduced, Diablo 3 would have lacked major end game features essential for its longevity like Greater Rifts and Kanai's Cube. He truly understood the importance of gamer relations and from others it sounds like he has a big gaming heart.
tus88 6y ago
Amy word on what the new games will be?
rurounijones 6y ago
The name "Dreamhaven" is very clever. * To players it sounds like a typical company stuido name. Quite nice * To current and ex-blizzard staff it is a beacon call. "Come and dream again here" * To Activision management it seems like a bit of an insult in that Blizzard was no longer a place where you could dream. But maybe I am reading too much into it.
eointierney 6y ago
edit - error
oneng 6y ago
I remember sitting right behind Mike Morhaime and Dustin Browder for the very first StarCraft 2 tournament at BlizzCon 2011 and I remember when Mvp won the championship and the whole crowd went absolutely insane. I went deaf, Dustin Browder was hollering, it was an experience for sure.
bird_monster 6y ago
I'm very excited to see where this goes. To me it will kind of make or break the entire Blizzard debate, whether they fell apart because they failed to adaptto the times (my theory), or they actually were constrained so aggressively by short term cash-first behaviors that they sold their soul (I do not believe this). If Dreamhaven creates successful, enjoyable games the answer will be clear.

381 points by raimue 6y ago

https://imgur.com/XwyReNw https://imgur.com/XwyReNw The above is a fairly interesting flowchart detailing where all of the core employees moved on to after leaving Blizzard. Some have met success, most have folded. To me, the only employee that ever mattered was Chris Metzen. He was the one who developed the core of all of their stories and personally approved every quest in WoW. If you're going to try to get players to emotionally connect to characters and story arcs, I would think that the writer would be the best place to figure out how.

moomin 6y ago
Disagree, the greatest story in the world won't save bad mechanics. I mean, Dark Souls has a lore people obsess about, but there's plenty of people with an emotional attachment to it with absolutely no clue what's going on.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  A good example is Elex. It's got a good world/story, fun factions, it looks pretty good, exploration is interesting and fun. But the combat is horrific. Balancing is terrible. You'll find high level enemies right next to low level ones. The actual gameplay is so bad. And you'll see it repeated over and over on the reviews on the steam page. Some people claim it gets better if you stick with it, and I did because I was playing it over a holiday. My experience was they're wrong, it never gets better.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  Likewise, interesting and fun mechanics don't necessarily create a fun game. Take EVE Online. I love the ideas of the game. There are no rules (As long as you're not hacking/cheating) to what players can do. You can scam people. You can kill noobs (Though if you're in high-security space, you'll be instagibbed by CONCORD, essentially the space police). And the fact that losing your ship means its GONE means there's always a demand for crafted goods. Skills are learned over time whether you're playing or not, so you don't need to grind. But...the actual gameplay is boring as hell [0]. [0] https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=66 https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=66
  - moomin 6y ago
    (ALWP) I mean, obviously plenty of people do love Eve Online, but the micro-mechanics shown in the video are awful. Compare to Dark Souls (again) where pretty much every combat is interesting (and has better be because you’re gonna redo it a lot until you crack it). OTOH, I found the mechanics of the recent Spider-Man game kind of fun, but the macro game is just endless repetition. Which feels true of a lot of AAA games these days.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      The PS4 Spiderman is a gorgeous game with amazing combat and parkour! Me and my wife both cringed really hard to the repetitiveness and the blandness of the characters however. Tons of plot inconsistencies!
      - moomin 6y ago
        Grief, yes, I found it ridiculously hard to actually care about the characters. They should have had a plot where the villain was sucking all of the interesting out of people. Just travelling through the city was way more fun.
zacharycohn 6y ago
The name text in that image is too small to read..
- fareesh 6y ago
  Open the image in a new tab then you can zoom-in as much as you want. imgur is not showing the full zoomed in version
BossingAround 6y ago
> If you're going to try to get players to emotionally connect to characters and story arcs, I would think that the writer would be the best place to figure out how. I was fairly attached to WoW while never paying much attention to the superficial stories and quests. I did at first, but it honestly wasn't great from what I remember (the first WoW), and so I just focused on the gameplay and team work rather than the story. Personally, I read books for the story, and play games for the mechanics.
- yazaddaruvala 6y ago
  I would just play WoW focusing on similar things to you and then watch a youtube video for the lore :)
xenihn 6y ago
How involved was he with Diablo 2? I don't know specifics, but I was disappointed by everything in Diablo 3, including the story, and I think that's due to the lack of the Blizzard North people.
Fnoord 6y ago
Caveat emptor: Flowchart is from 2011. Runic Games, for example, folded, and the Schaeffer brothers parted ways. Max founded Etchra. Otherwise informative, thanks for linking.
throwawaynothx 6y ago
I played wow in korean without being able to read any of the quests. just to have my warlock pet names in korean. story is not a big part of wow. ffxiv however..
nkrisc 6y ago
How old is this? Under Carbine Studios it says unnamed MMO but I have to imagine that is Wildstar and this is just very old.
- delinquenz 6y ago
  The chart says April 2011

markbnine 6y ago

Me thinks they used the Fantasy Place Name generator. . . https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/fantasy-town-names.php https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/fantasy-town-names.php

mk_chan 6y ago
I love that website! I use it all the time to get some inspiration for my hobby project names
onychomys 6y ago
I just hope they don't hire a bunch of lawyers and go after Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis: http://dreamhavenbooks.com http://dreamhavenbooks.com
bovermyer 6y ago
Unrelated anecdote - the person that develops that site is part of a community of generator website creators. We build all kinds of fun tools like that.
- swarnie_ 6y ago
  Out of interest is the reddit username generator written by someone in that community? (https://perchance.org/reddit-username https://perchance.org/reddit-username) Its my go-to place when i need another 30-40 accounts.
  - debaserab2 6y ago
    Why do you need 30-40 reddit accounts?
    - swarnie_ 6y ago
      I like messing about with bots and auto-posting. Lots of subreddits have restrictions based on karma and account age. Mass creating in batches seemed the easiest answer.

jagger27 6y ago

Those are some pretty big names. The gaming industry has shown over and over how smaller companies fight toe-to-toe with giant companies if they produce games that people actually want to play. I wish them the best. Everyone loves an underdog.

hobofan 6y ago
Announcements of new companies like this are also the reason why I'm not as negative as some other people about the Bethesda acquisition. In the short term it might cause some more consolidation, but the whole gaming market is still growing and new independent studios are opening up, which counteracts the consolidation to some degree.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago
  The problem with the Bethesda thing is that I won't get to play Doom Reboot 3 on PS5. I don't care about Xbox, heck I can't even differentiate the new model from the older one due to the confusing names.
  - _mkef 6y ago
    If you have a decent gaming PC Microsoft will still take care of you.
  - notSupplied 6y ago
    Given that the Doom Reboot is all about juggling an insane number of tasks at once you’re better off playing it on PC anyway. In fact I suspect this series is limiting its potential audience because the core play style of fast weapon switching just isn’t very viable on console.

Danieru 6y ago

In the interest of driving conversation away from nostalgia-ism let's talk about the economics of a high-tier game career. Morhaime has now left the company he helped found, and one he sold off eons ago. Now stepping into a new vessel he gets to sell a bit less equity this time around and bring along the cream of his leadership team. No doubt he funded the initial paperwork out of his own pocket, but soon accepted one of the flood of investment offers. It is an old play book yet no one talks about it when the play succeeds. Remember that falling out Martin O'Donnell had with Bungie? Did you notice how Martin moved on to found his own studio, one which successfully shipped a non-trivial game? Now not only does he get all the creative control he wanted, but even all of the financial upside. Video games are so successful even those people getting pushed out of the "golden castle" have the skills and connections to build their own castle. No doubt this would change if games were not such a quick growing industry, but we've maintained that growth for a couple decades now. This I think leads back to a fan favorite topic: unionization in games. For the opposite reason one might think: those successful enough to be "too important too lose" for studios are more likely setup new studios before they ever spend their political capital on unionization. This leaves the suits, who by definition are incapable of setting a studio, and the "bulk of the creative team". Hollywood could unionize because no matter how famous no star alone is capable of walking out the door to make a new studio. Thus the stars and more importantly directors saw the studios as overlords, not future peers. Games does not have that, and it is a core problem the games unionization movement needs to figure out a solution to.

WarChortle 6y ago
Actors make their own production studios all the time. That's why Hollywood unionized the way it did. A specific studio couldn't unionize because they would just get dissolved and reformed under a new LLC. No actor or famous game designer is capable of creating a AAA movie/game by themselves. They need a lot of people to work on it. The only difference is Hollywood the entire pool of workers unionized they have no choice but to hire a union worker. Game designers/programmers need to follow the same formula. The two industries have exactly the same problem, Hollywood workers have been around long enough to figure out the solution.
- 6y ago

duxup 6y ago

Hopefully this works out. We see a lot of "core member of great thing founds own thing" and you really want to see them succeed but having an organization succeed takes a a lot of people with lots of different skills. I'm not convinced that any given jumble of highly talented folks actually produce something if we somehow ran a but of iterations of "jumble of highly talented folks". I've heard plenty of stories of such folks going their own way to be stopped by basic business type problems like project management, just managing people, maintaining focus, raising money and keeping investors happy, etc.

plorkyeran 6y ago
Mike Morhaime was the president of blizzard for quite a while. He should be very familiar with the management side of things.
username90 6y ago
He founded Blizzard, he can probably do it again. I think he is the last of the early Blizzard people to go off on his own, so we'll see if the success was a fluke or if there is something special about him.
- duxup 6y ago
  I really hope so. It just takes a lot of pieces to really make a thing.
jib 6y ago
They have a great group of people. I’ve worked with maybe 6-7 of them directly, and they’re all on my list of people I’d actively want to work with again, across a pretty wide set of skills. The ones I just know of are also people friends say are both great at their stuff and good to work with, so I have high hopes they’ll make some awesome stuff.

Thaxll 6y ago

Even with big names backing those studios, it's pretty hard to release good games from scratch and to last.

saberience 6y ago

As an ex-Blizzard engineer (left last year shortly after the 2019 layoffs) this makes so much sense to me. I saw Mike a few weeks before he announced his resignation and it was so obvious to me that he was super sad about leaving. Rumors were rife at the time that he was being "forced out" by Activision and I think that ended up being the case. Mike left Blizzard some months before the layoffs were announced and the general conclusion was that Mike was told by Bobby Kotick that he had to do the layoffs or leave Blizzard, and hence Mike ended up resigning. His resignation email said all the same stuff like "Mike wanting to spend more time with family" etc etc. But now it's fairly clear that was all crap, he still wanted to run a games company, he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard.

jayd16 6y ago
>he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard. I'm curious to hear some anecdotes about this. I've worked at an Activision studio and the central management mostly stayed out of the way. There were meetings and green lights and deadlines but it seemed pretty normal. We didn't see a lot of "corporate says X so change everything!" From my experience the studios have a lot of autonomy and Blizzard is even more in control of its own destiny.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  The Blizzard of the past decade is nothing like the Blizzard of the 90s/2000s. They're a husk of their former selves.
- summerlight 6y ago
  Or it might be the case where your reporting lines were able to do their job and keep you away from all the upper-level politics? I also used to work on online game companies and thought that we were given lots of autonomy like you until I found our director and producer fiercely fighting back against all the pressures coming from corporate and sales guys in executive level meetings. Because of this experience, I wouldn't take those autonomy for granted; Mike probably also had done the same thing more than 10 years and given up for some reasons.

deleted 6y ago

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mewse-hn 6y ago

As a veteran WoW player now playing classic, I hope this play works out. There was a ~40 min youtube video released a couple months ago that details the many ways contemporary Blizzard has lost their soul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg The short version is Blizzard is a shell of their former glory, and they are making decisions based on cash and appeasement of the Chinese govt. Most of you probably remember the Diablo: Immortal reception (Chinese mobile game presented as a keynote at the American, PC-playing blizzcon fan convention). I deeply hope Morhaime is able to recapture the lightning in a bottle that existed at old Blizzard, and this doesn't end up as another Hellgate: London fiasco.

Snild 6y ago
I loved Hellgate: London. The game definitely lacked polish (ran out of money, I assume), but the general gameplay feel was great.
- jug 6y ago
  I agree and the timing was pretty poor for that game. Windows Vista was JUST out the door and the graphics card drivers were downright terrible at the time, often crashing. Reason being Vista used a completely new driver model (WDDM). I recall HGL also had some unfortunate memory leak issues. In general I think that game was largely hamstrung by performance issues for one reason or another. The idea of a FPS Action RPG like that wa as simple as it was brilliant. I've wondered why it hadn't been done before and still hasn't quite been done again. Games like Dark Souls exist but I don't think they're quite the same. Rumor is Diablo IV was going to go there but Blizzard later changed their mind, rather opting for a traditional isometric view. I think they lose a lot of immersion doing that. Imagine sneaking through damp, dark cellars and have demons lurk around the corners, and everything built upon a solid itemization system and replayability with randomized maps.
md5person 6y ago
> "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg" Content aside - I feel like this video is terribly edited, scripted and produced. It's impossible to follow - thanks to all the shallow jokes, weird cuts and messy presentation. Almost like it's intentionally made for people without an attention span...

munificent 6y ago

> Morhaime will act as CEO of Dreamhaven as a whole, which will be based in Irvine, California. It marks his first major move in the games industry since stepping down as Blizzard president in 2018 and leaving the company he helped create in 2019. Sounds like the typical expiration date for a non-compete, so I assume they've been planning to do this for some time. Let's hope it works out. In this era of constant consolidation, I'm always happy to see new companies spring up.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
It's in California, so non-competes were probably not the issue.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  In CA, non-competes are still valid against executives, founders, and any employee with a material share of the ownership of the company (for a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, a material share can be a fraction of a % of the total value of the company).
- justinlloyd 6y ago
  A "non-compete" in California is very enforceable. Though not in the way that most people think of non-competes. "I will pay you $X, at $Y per month to not do that thing for the next $Z months. If you decide to do that thing before $Z months have elapsed, the money dries up. Also, the amount of money you receive each month increases with each passing month." I did a deal with my small company in 2008 where I sold IP. I personally agreed not to go and recreate that IP for at least 5 years, and for that, I would receive revenue share from the current IP. I also did a deal with a different small company I created at the tail end of 2016 whereby I received a cash payout with an attached clause of being sued into oblivion should I a) attempt to work with the client in some capacity for a period of time or b) talk about client so as not to jeopardise the in-place contracts. The company that acquired my company was interested in the contracts that my company had with a client, not the IP so much. Non-competes in California are very enforceable, but they usually come with money attached and are not used to bludgeon a Sandwich Artist from earning a living at the deli across the road.

Sawamara 6y ago

I have respect for Dustin Bowder's vision with regards to Diablo III, however disastrous it proved to be with the game's hardcore fans. It misunderstood what the franchise was about and fundamentally went against some of its core "values", but at the end of the day, pre-nerf Diablo III at Inferno was one of the most heavy skill-based kite-based arpg to date. You had to be there.

bob1029 6y ago
To me this hints at the core of why small/niche games will always have a place. Diablo 3 and any other mass-consumption AAA title is going to have to compromise some of the edginess to gain wider acceptance. I personally thought the D3 launch experience into the first few months was incredible. That said, I can see how it upset some of the fan base for various reasons. Overwatch is another example where you can see this battle unfold. There are now 2 completely separate competitive ranked queue options with different rule sets in order to bridge this gap in gameplay expectations. I personally prefer the unconstrained queue where more dynamic teamwork is required, but a lot of players prefer the role queue where they can expect certain meta styles. I think both are perfectly valid ways to play the game, and this approach might be a good example of ways we might be able to handle these varying expectations in a more general way.
echohack5 6y ago
I believe you mean Jay Wilson? Dustin Browder's involvement with Diablo 3 was only from a Strike Team perspective. Browder is more known for his work on Starcraft 2.
- VRay 6y ago
  Man, I hope so Diablo 3's hardest difficulty at launch was a nightmare. You had to move around with Ninja Gaiden/Dark Souls-level precision in a game engine that just was _not_ designed to give you that much precise control So often I'd be trying to run out of something, accidentally click a monster instead of a patch of open ground, and my guy would stop to turn around and shoot. It was horrible Not only was it un-fun to play, it actively made me feel bad. "Hey, game's over, you're just not good enough to play any more Diablo. Get out."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

__s 6y ago

Morhaime showed up to HomeStory Cup (StarCraft II tournament) in 2019, & took part in their poker night: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/511760157?t=9h20m7s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/511760157?t=9h20m7s It lets you see him relaxing as a pretty chill guy. He really cares about creating good games One of the insightful remarks he made was that StarCraft was easier to balance than WarCraft because it had so much more asymmetry

chrisco255 6y ago
I hope at least one of these studios is working on an RTS.
1123581321 6y ago
Do you happen to know roughly where he comes in, or where the best parts are? I am scrubbing but it’s so long!
- __s 6y ago
  9h20m7s. For the most part he's being a polite poker player by keeping his mouth shut. Tells a small story at 11h05m30s
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Thank you!

zemo 6y ago

I hope they replicate the high level of product quality that Blizzard was shipping from 1995 to 2012 but not the thing where they're infamous in the game industry for underpaying people.

lorthemar 6y ago

I'm really glad to hear this. Morhaime, Bowder, and all deserve to create games that they feel attached to. Just grab Samwise and Metzen so we can go back to the 2000s :)

manas1 6y ago

sdcsvx

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://www.ign.com/articles/mike-morhaime-new-company-blizzard-dreamhaven-secret-door-moonshot https://www.ign.com/articles/mike-morhaime-new-company-blizz..., which points to this. There's also https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-morhaime-blizzard-dreamhaven/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-m....

dang 6y ago

Another original source on this appears to be https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-morhaime-blizzard-dreamhaven/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-m....

jug 6y ago

Interesting! I think Morhaime retained a lot of the "Blizzard spirit" that many feel has been lost in recent years. In a sense, Morhaime leaving Blizzard felt like the transition to the new "Activision-Blizzard" model was now finally complete. Something more than Morhaime alone left Blizzard that day and it felt terrible to watch Blizzcon and not really see a happy man. It was apparently Morhaime who gave us Diablo 3 fans the scraps of the cancelled second expansion as free content update as pure fan service. Without these and the concepts they introduced, Diablo 3 would have lacked major end game features essential for its longevity like Greater Rifts and Kanai's Cube. He truly understood the importance of gamer relations and from others it sounds like he has a big gaming heart.

tus88 6y ago

Amy word on what the new games will be?

rurounijones 6y ago

The name "Dreamhaven" is very clever. * To players it sounds like a typical company stuido name. Quite nice * To current and ex-blizzard staff it is a beacon call. "Come and dream again here" * To Activision management it seems like a bit of an insult in that Blizzard was no longer a place where you could dream. But maybe I am reading too much into it.

eointierney 6y ago

edit - error

oneng 6y ago

I remember sitting right behind Mike Morhaime and Dustin Browder for the very first StarCraft 2 tournament at BlizzCon 2011 and I remember when Mvp won the championship and the whole crowd went absolutely insane. I went deaf, Dustin Browder was hollering, it was an experience for sure.

bird_monster 6y ago

I'm very excited to see where this goes. To me it will kind of make or break the entire Blizzard debate, whether they fell apart because they failed to adaptto the times (my theory), or they actually were constrained so aggressively by short term cash-first behaviors that they sold their soul (I do not believe this). If Dreamhaven creates successful, enjoyable games the answer will be clear.