Tell-All Book About Blizzard, Activision, and Xbox Arrives October 8

Bloomberg investigative journalist Jason Schreier has written a tell-all book about the history of Blizzard Entertainment that covers its merger with Activision and the subsequent Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The book, called Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, arrives on October 8, and I’ll be reviewing it soon here on Thurrott.com.

Play Nice is based on interviews with over 300 current and former employees and it covers 30 years of video game history, from the inception of Blizzard in 1991 through the past year as part of Microsoft Gaming. The company’s first games–Battle Chess and The Lord of the Rings–were released on MS-DOS and the Commodore Amiga, and early hits like StarCraft and Diablo were overshadowed by an SEC investigation into fraud by its corporate parent at the time. But its biggest breakout hit arrived in 2004 with World of Warcraft, which was originally conceived as a response to EverQuest.

Blizzard merged with Activision in 2007, creating one of the biggest game publishers in the industry. But thanks to the toxic culture under CEO Bobby Kotick, who coincidentally joined Activision in 1991, the same year Blizzard was founded, things went downhill quickly. Kotick canceled a Warcraft successor called Titan and put key lieutenants inside Blizzard, ending its independence, and leading to ill-advised forays into microtransactions and quicker development times. And then Blizzard cofounder and CEO Mike Morhaime left Blizzard because he was sick of fighting with Kotick. He was soon followed by many others.

When sexual misconduct and discrimination lawsuits threatened to sink the company in the early 2020s, Microsoft saw an opportunity to address the cultural problems at Activision Blizzard and snag a key industry player for Xbox. But after finally beating back multiple regulatory challenges, Microsoft subsequently laid off hundreds of Blizzard employees despite the success of Diablo IV, leading to bad feelings and more uncertainty about the future.

Play Nice is described as “Barbarians at the Gate, but with digital dragons and blood-thirsty trolls.” I can’t wait to read it.