Play nice The rise, fall, and future of Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment, known for World of Warcraft, Diablo, and other popular games, was founded by two friends who met at UCLA more than 30 years ago. After years of exponential growth, Blizzard raked in billions of dollars. Within the past decade, the company found itself entangled in lawsuits, culture problems, and a hostile takeover. Schreier, a journalist who focuses on the video game industry, delivers a scrupulously fact-checked book. He delves into the company's history of multiple executives, power struggles, and game development snafus detailed in firsthand experiences with 350 former and current employees, game makers, and executives. Stories move from the good times in the beginning through periods of bad products, layoffs, marketing disasters, and more. Schreier covers how Blizzard became a video game empire, the experiences of BlizzCon, and StarCraft's rise and fall in South Korea, just to mention a few topics. This book is for gamers and those who are interested in the history of Blizzard, its products, and the insider world of gaming.

This damning report from Bloomberg News journalist Schreier (Press Reset) details how Blizzard Entertainment, the video game hitmaker behind the World of Warcraft and Diablo franchises, lost its way. Schreier traces the studio's history from its founding in 1991 by two UCLA grads and its raucous early days (screaming and fistfights were common occurrences around the office) to its maturation into an industry star and its fateful 2008 acquisition by competitor Activision. With an ear for pithy soundbites ("When millions turn into billions, everything changes"), Schreier draws on interviews with game testers, programmers, executives, and other Blizzard personnel to create a vivid portrait of the company's decline under Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, whose prioritizing of profits over quality resulted in demoralizing mass layoffs and curtailing creative risks in favor of milking established franchises. Schreier makes clear that not all of Blizzard's problems stemmed from Kotick; a 2021 lawsuit brought by the state of California alleged that since the company's early days, the few women who worked there contended with unequal pay, sexual harassment, and an HR department unwilling to discipline perpetrators of misconduct. Animated by thorough reporting, this deep dive into the gaming industry's dark side unsettles. Agent: Charlie Olsen, InkWell Management. (Oct.)

Chronicling the ups and downs of a popular video game empire. Beginning with the friendship and shared video game obsession of two UCLA tech buddies, Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, who in 1991 founded a video game company called Silicon & Synapse, Bloomberg News journalist Schreier astutely charts the evolution of Blizzard Entertainment, whose hits like World of Warcraft and others put the entertainment developer on the gaming map. Though originality during the company's early days was challenging to achieve, eventually, after numerous name changes and the development and immense popularity of Warcraft and its spawned sequels, Blizzard catapulted into the tech gaming arena. The ensuing contract negotiations, acquisitions, and mergers, namely with Activision, ushered the company forward, but those progressions came preloaded with pitfalls. Schreier doesn't overlook or sugarcoat the less savory details of Blizzard's sketchy "frat house" corporate culture, its "aura of secrecy," its questionable office politics and philosophies, or how its games like Diablo and StarCraft suffered sagging sales. The author also digs into the scandal surrounding Morhaime, Blizzard's president for two decades, who would abruptly leave to start his own company. A frequent documentarian of the gaming industry, Schreier cleverly incorporates commentary from original Silicon & Synapse programmers, tech experts, executives, game programmers, and Blizzard employees themselves to create a well-rounded image of the company as well as the grave mistakes costing the company its reputation, despite being purchased by Microsoft in 2023 in an acquisition lauded as the largest in tech and video game history. A thorough, well-researched report on the evolution of Blizzard Entertainment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.