‘I will always keep playing’ – Interview with Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime
The BlizzCon is big and gets bigger every year. Eleven years ago, the first edition attracted 8,000 visitors. That number has now risen to 30,000; the available tickets sold out within a day this year. An entrance fee of 200 dollars was apparently no problem. At the head of the company that manages to attract all those fans to Anaheim is Mike Morhaime. He has held the position since the beginning of the studio, which first went through life as Silicon & Synapse, then was called Chaos Studios for a while, but is still best known as Blizzard Entertainment. We spoke to Morhaime on the second day of the convention, when things had calmed down a bit over the first day’s announcements. A good moment to put the director to the test, if only because he had turned 50 the day before.
If you look at the many fans at BlizzCon, you must conclude that 50 is quite an age and that Morhaime is at least a lot older than the average fan. Blizzard’s top consists of quite a few of his peers. Aren’t he and his companions getting a little old making games for a young audience? “I don’t think so. Our generation is the first to grow up with games. We still play games and I don’t think we will ever stop. So hopefully there is no age limit for the work we do. Plus we have a lot of young employees. The company still has the same demographic composition as our target group.”
Do you ask the opinion of those younger employees?
Not special. We solicit feedback from everyone in the company, including our younger employees. We also try to take a good look around us. We try to see where innovations take place and learn from them. Hopefully that will keep us relevant. We look at how the market is developing, at what is successful. We then try to improve that. In my generation, we also have children from whom we learn. I have a 2.5 year old daughter. It already plays on an iPad. She played Hearthstone’s first tutorial and loved it. The game’s Hearth & Home video keeps playing them and she keeps singing the song from the video. She’ll probably be able to play it for real in a year.
Speaking of innovation, one of the biggest advances in technology is virtual reality. Do you think there is a future for VR?
Virtual reality certainly has a future. But I don’t think anyone knows exactly what it’s going to look like and how we’re going to use the technology. We are following developments, but it is still much too early to do anything with it. There are still not enough people with the necessary equipment in the house. We are waiting for that. And if there are, we first have to figure out how to use it properly in our games. For now, however, there are still some challenges to overcome. The interface, the headset you need, is the biggest challenge for now. People wearing a headset have to walk around in an impact-resistant environment. That will not be a success, that hurdle must be overcome first. You don’t really want to put the headsets of today on your head.
Until a few years ago, Blizzard was a studio of big projects. Games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III and StarCraft II, which were worked on by a large team for a long time. In recent years, Blizzard has made games with games like Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and even Overwatch that were much shorter in development and that were also developed with fewer people. Is that the future? Small teams, short projects?
Indeed, the lesson of recent years is that projects do not necessarily have to have the proportions of World of Warcraft to be successful. But I don’t want to commit myself to time or size. We want to keep making games that are special, that’s the most important thing. If we have an idea for a great game, we will make it, even if it requires a large team.
Some major publishers seem to be taking the opposite path. They opt for ever larger projects. They make fewer games, but work on them with larger teams, which get more time and money.
Quality takes precedence over quantity. But it’s not always what it seems. The team that delivered World of Warcraft consisted of 60 men. In hindsight that may have been too little, but still. Games that we might now think of as small projects have bigger teams. For Blizzard, it’s about focus and scope. We want to deliver something that has quality, and we use that as a stepping stone to something even better. Look at Hearthstone, and what we’ve added to it lately. In the social field, but also the options for single player. Not everything has to be completely finished at once. The foundation has to be good and we have to build on that. The same goes for Overwatch. That’s an interesting game anyway. There is a lot of story behind it, but the story is told completely outside the game. Still, we think the story is important. For the experience, for the bond you build with the characters as a player. We deliberately chose this setup, and I think it works well.
In an interview, Cliff Bleszinski recently admitted that LawBreakers is nowhere near as successful as Overwatch. According to him, the lack of a good story was an important reason for this.
It’s also because we have a lot more plans with Overwatch. We love the universe and the characters. As far as we’re concerned, Overwatch is only the first game in a long series, so we need that story too. We want people to become familiar with the history and the characters now. That’s also why we announced the story even before the game was released. This is how we try to build a bond. It’s a big disadvantage if a game doesn’t have all that.
Like many publishers, Blizzard is experimenting with microtransactions, a system regularly criticized by gamers. Is there a way to handle microtransactions properly, a way in which it should or can be done?
No, there isn’t. There is no solution that works for everyone. It strongly depends on the game. With every game you will have to ask yourself what you want to achieve and how some form of microtransactions could fit into that. What that looks like depends on several factors, and there’s certainly no one-size-fits-all option. We are indeed experimenting with it. Fortunately, both Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are still playable without having to pay for them.
Blizzard has a good reputation. It must be difficult to maintain that reputation.
Dedication, that’s the keyword. Expectations are high and we are very proud of that. At the same time, you also have to want to comply, and that demands a lot from Blizzard and its employees. Fortunately, we are all avid gamers and our own expectations are also high. If we don’t comply, then there is a huge force within the company that will hold me and my senior colleagues accountable. This almost automatically ensures that we come up with a solution for what is seen as a problem.
Then it is important to employ good people. What is striking at Blizzard is that almost all of the personnel in the higher echelons have moved up from lower positions within the company. How do you choose the right people, the people who make the games that make Blizzard so distinctive?
We look for a combination of talent, passion and dedication. We all work very hard and without talent you will not get there. Not without that passion, however. That is the fuel for the dedication that is needed. We are looking for people who understand that Blizzard is a special employer. It’s not just a job, but the chance to become part of something very special. And we encourage people to do that. Many people have indeed progressed to higher positions. Take Chris Sigaty, who now heads up StarCraft II as executive producer. It came in here at the QA department. If a place becomes available somewhere, we look both internally and externally. Not every internal candidate will progress, but it is good to know that someone wants to grow further. Then we can try to increase his skills and perhaps next time we will succeed in moving on. Blizzard has a program where you can work elsewhere within the company for a few months. If someone has ambitions that cannot be realized immediately, working in another internal location is often so good that they can and want to stay there.
Allen Adham is back to the old nest. All three founders are now employed by the company again.
Yes, that’s great. It is very nice to have everyone together again. Allen was heavily involved in the creation of important games such as Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft and World of Warcraft. He was the lead designer of WoW. He left before the game hit stores, but was still employed when key decisions about the direction of the project were made. Allen is a smart man, with a rare combination of talents. He has a background in programming, but also a business background, and he’s also a hardcore gamer. Most people are good at one thing, but Allen is good at both the big picture and the detail.
Is there still a chance that the gentlemen of Blizzard North will return?
MM: We have regular contact. However, they are busy with their own projects and seem happy with it.
Battle.net is no longer just for Blizzard games. Destiny 2 has recently been playable on your platform. It is not the intention to make Battle.net an open platform like Steam, but still: what if Brendan Greene shows up tomorrow and asks if PUBG can move from Steam to Battle.net?
Then we will of course think about it. However, we are not actively looking for games to expand the platform with. We still see it mainly as a Blizzard platform, but also as a platform where you can find the best PC games. We heard that Bungie was planning to release Destiny 2 for PC as well, but hadn’t yet decided how. At the time we thought ‘if we ever want to allow a game that we didn’t make ourselves on our platform, then Destiny 2 will definitely qualify’. The next question was: how do we think our players will react? Do we think they would like to see Destiny 2 among the other games? We strongly suspected that it would, so at that time there were only some technical and logistical hurdles to overcome. I think it works fine.
Destiny 2, but also Overwatch and Diablo III are major titles on consoles. Will there be a place on Battle.net for console gamers soon?
Now you can link a console account to a Battle.net account, which brings some small benefits, but nothing more. First, though, we need to figure out how to get console gamers to prefer their account on Battle.net over a console platform. It would of course be great if all console gamers became part of the Battle.net community. We are considering it, but it is still a work in progress.