Mike Morhaime on Blizzard's Iteration Culture that Built Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo

probably 90% of the success is attributed to the execution because I mean there's plenty of great ideas, but a lot of it is how well you execute against that. There's almost no Blizzard games that I can think of where we knew what game we wanted to make. We made the game and it went exactly as planned. We would head down a path and then we would become so much smarter and we'd learn, you know, what was working or what didn't work about that and we would alter course. What we were really committed to was making sure that when we did finally ship, it was something we were really proud of. Welcome to the Gaming Founders Podcast, a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry. I'm Eden, the CEO of Pragma. We build tools for studios to connect with their players and essential services, including First Look, our player relationship platform, Connect, and Engine, our cloud and source-based backends that power many of the world's best studios today. If you have an interest in getting exclusive access to

the game industry's best early access games, sign up at playtest.fverlook.gg. And I'm Kevin Zayn, partner at Upfront Ventures. We're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco. I lead game investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work, including Pragma. We interview founders on their origin stories, the tactics that help them survive and thrive, and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies. Learn more and subscribe today at pragma.gg/gaming founders. Today is a special episode with Blizzard and Dream Haven co-founder Mike Moheim. Whether it's first trying Diablo I in the Chinese PC cafe or Starcraft Brood War multiplayer via 56k dialup modem or getting the band back together to play pioneering hero shooter Overwatch. I grew up like so many others in the '9s and 2000s as a diehard Blizzard fanboy. We'll dive into the early leap of faith

founding days to the inflection point that was Warcraft 2 to multiplayer being a core tenant of the company vision from day one to ending with just how much games development has changed these days and how act 2 with Dream Haven is built on much deeper collaboration between game developer and publisher. Let's dive right in. Welcome to the Gaming Founders podcast, Mike. Incredible to have you here, especially, you know, I think we're both Blizzard fanboys growing up. So, uh, lot lots to talk about. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Why don't we start way back, you know, tell us a bit about what first drew you into games and technology growing up. I remember uh when the Atari 2600 came out. Actually, before that, I remember when Pong came out in 76. Thought it was the coolest thing ever because we were able to like actually display something on a TV screen and interact with it and that was so awesome, you know. And then our friends got the Atari 2600. That was great. And then, you know, of course, we wanted a gaming console. I had a brother and a sister and my parents, I think,

wanted to use it as a sort of an educational opportunity for us to, okay, you know, there there are multiple competing consoles out there. It's not just the Atari 2600. So, let's go and do our research and try out the different ones. And, um, actually, there was a higherend console called the Ballet Professional Arcade. So, we decided that, okay, that's that's the one we want. It has better graphics, more powerful processor. Um, it was a little bit more expensive. So, my brother, sister, and I pulled our our money. We couldn't quite afford it. So, my parents made up the difference. And then we got this thing. And one of the cool things about the Bali was you could buy a basic cartridge that let you actually program this thing. Oh. And it only had it it didn't have a keyboard, but it had a little keypad like a calculator keypad that was on the console and you could get the and the basic cartridge came with overlays so

you could green five or something was go to, you know, and so you could actually type keywords that way. Um, and that's my first exposure to programming. Basic cartridge had a little basic manual and I was just blown away by How old were you at that time? I was in sixth grade. Oh, wow. And it turned out, so I I get this letter in a in the mail from a guy up in San Francisco. Not sure how they got my address. He put out a newsletter for the basic cartridge where he published programs that you could type in. And so, um, so I would do that every month. I I'd subscribe to his new newsletter and I'd get his thing. And I was so excited every time. And I'd type in the programs and try to understand how they worked. And usually they didn't work right away, so I'd have to debug them. And then um in order to save the programs, you'd save them off at 300 baud to cassette. That's my first exposure to gaming and game programming. And uh I didn't never

really considered it as a career until really right before I graduated college. What were you studying like originally before? Yeah, I studied electrical engineering. But the last year that I was there, um I became good friends with Alan Adam who was studying computer science and engineering. And Allan was he already had the plan, you know, when when he graduated, he was going to go start a game company. And and uh I ended up graduating before him. I got a job at Western Digital, which is down here was down here at the time in Irvine. Oh, the hard drive company. Yeah, the hard drive company. But actually, at the time, they had a a network card division. So, I got a job with the network card division writing low low-level test software to test the network cards. And Allan um was about to graduate and he approached me and said, "Hey, Mike, I'm when I graduate, I'm going to start up a game company and I'd love for you to go into business with me, you know." And um my initial

reaction was I have I don't know anything about that. like I studied electrical engineering. I took a few programming classes, but I don't know anything about game development. And he said, "It's not rocket science. We're both smart. If we put our minds together, we can figure out anything. And I've u got some experience doing this. I can teach you what you need to know." Did you guys do group projects together in school? Like how did he decide that you were smart and that maybe you'd be able to pick this up? So, I guess um one thing that factored into this for me, I had taken six months off and I did an internship up in uh San Jose at this company that was making a 486 clone processor. And while I was there, like I had a different perspective on school. And when I went back to school, I kind of was the instead of the guy sitting in the back row of class trying to stay

awake during class, I was sitting in front um front row. I if the teacher said something I didn't understand, my hand would go up and I wasn't bashful about asking questions. Um cuz I I figured it out. I figured out that they're all there for me, right? And I I'm not the dumbest one in class. So if I don't understand something, there's probably other people that al also don't understand it. And so I just um had a sort of different attitude about being there. And I also really appreciated the idea of um learning for the sake of learning, which when you're out in the real world working, you know, and asking questions about stuff. I would ask questions about how stuff worked in this processor. And the most common answer I'd get is, "Oh, you don't need to know that. you know, you're working on this other thing and it doesn't really matter, but I was just there to learn. And so, I went back to school and I was just really excited just to absorb as much as I could. And I think that that

created a positive impression cuz Allan was just watching, you know, this person who was asking good questions and really motivated to learn. You know, the other thing that happened is um right before we graduated, I actually took a um C programming class because I wanted to learn C and it wasn't required for my major, but the final project was to write the AI for a checkers program. And um Allan would be like the person that I would go to when I'd get stuck on stuff or had questions about things. So, I remember showing him my program. It was just written, it was just uh written for Unix. It was all text. Um no graphics, no mouse support or anything. And he and Allan just made the comment, it'd be really easy to add mouse and graphic support to that. And so the next time he saw me, I had mouse and graphic support. And you know, it was all all pretty and and everything. And so I think he just

uh saw somebody who had a lot of initiative, who was really interested, motivated. Okay. So, how did uh you're at Western Digital and Allan was saying, "Let's start a game company together." Is that is that the how Blizzard started right there? Not exactly right there. So, the first thing I did is um it was a big step. So, I had him pitch the idea to my dad, you know, and he came over, he did the pitch, and um my dad actually advised me not to do it. He said, "You've got a good job at Western Digital. seems super risky, you know. I don't know. I went against my dad's advice. The pitch failed for him and it worked for you. It did. Yeah. I was, you know, it it was a leap of faith for sure. But, um, you know, my dad would would look he was so proud of of Blizzard and all the stuff we were doing that he would he would laugh about that. What was the first step? Did you guys uh obvious

venture capital? No. So, I borrowed $15,000 from my grandmother and Allan um had a graduation gift, I think, and we basically each put $10,000 into the company. So, his came from his graduation gift from his parents and mine came from a loan uh to my grandmother, which I eventually paid back, but hopefully with some interest. Yeah. Yeah. No interest. Don't don't tell the IRS. Yeah. So maybe speak jumping right into Blizzard. I mean what made you I mean you guys were so early to internet multiplayer games like what what made you want to go down that path? We always had a belief that um the best way to to have a replayable game is to introduce other players especially if you're playing against players. But even like with the Lost Vikings, which was one of our earlier games, which started out just as a single player puzzle game, you know, we thought, you know, there's got we've got to make a way for you to

play with your friend, uh, couch co-op. And so, you know, we added the ability to to have you each control different Vikings on the screen, but I think being able to share these experiences with other people um, adds a whole other dimension. And so we're always looking for ways to do that, you know, and so I guess the first real internet game was Warcraft Orcs and Humans, you know, which originally started out um you could play over um you could connect using a null modem cable to another computer. You could um connect via a modem. You could connect you could play on a local area network. And we didn't support playing over the internet, but there was a third-party utility called Cali that allowed you to that basically emulated a local area network. So you could type in the IP address of who you wanted to play with. Mhm. And it would connect it and it would sort of simulate it make it look to the game like you were still playing over

LAN. And of course, you know, after that, we're like, okay, we we have to start supporting this out of the box. What's like the origin story of Warcraft? What was the inspiration? Like who came up with that name? I mean, all the what's the lore, I guess. Well, often we would go to the Consumer Electronics show and we'd look around to see what what games were coming out and we'd see uh we'd talk about different trends. At some point, you know, somebody saw Dune 2 um and we're like, "Oh man, this is so cool." Well, of course, DNA 2 was a single player game and um like the idea of what if you could play a game like this, but um multiplayer. And then in terms of the setting, I think Allan was always trying to tap into things that felt familiar, you know, traditional fantasy. Uh obviously we're all raised on Tolken and Dungeons and Dragons and so but um you

know things like orcs and dwarves and goblins, these are things that sort of feel feel familiar to people and you know we wanted to put our own spin on them and create a a universe around them that was was new and interesting but also still had that sort of that felt familiar. What did it look like back then to like get a game like that made and published? did like where did the money come from? How did you distribute it? When we first started the company, we were doing a lot of um conversions from one platform to another platform of games. Um and then we started doing some original titles. Many of them in the beginning were funded by Interplay Productions, you know. episode we we did uh Rock and Roll Racing, Lost Vikings, Blackthornne, we did some work with um with Sunsoft um Death and Return of Superman, Justice League Task Force. So around the Lost Vikings rock and roll racing time, so like 93 94, we were

approached by Davidson and Associates that they made educational software like Ma Math Blaster. Mhm. And um we had actually done a port for them called Kid Works 2. It was a creativity kit. We actually um this was my project. I actually didn't create KidWorks 2, but they had it out on the Mac and they hired us to port it over to Windows. So, that was my project. It went really well. That kind of got us got them to know us a little bit. And we the strategic reason for us taking on that project was we thought that they could be a good partner for when we wanted to start publishing our own games because they had um really great infrastructure to manufacture boxes and distribute them to retail. But instead what happened is um sort of they they saw the work that we were doing. We were getting awards for you

know our console games. um video games magazine had just picked us as the best software developer for 1993 to like awards are coming in, our games are doing okay, they're getting some acclaim. They said, "Hey, um how about we we buy you guys, you become part of Davidson, retain your identity, creative control, nothing has to change. Basically, you'll be our entertainment division." You know, we know educational software, but we don't know entertainment, and you guys seem to know what you're doing. So we weren't really looking to sell at the time. So our initial reaction was nah we we don't want to do that. But then they said well think about it because you know you'll have access to all these resources our infrastructure and you'll be able to continue doing you know all the things that you want to do. And so ultimately we said okay that that sounds pretty good. And you know we decided to sell. Of course, back then, like we didn't get any protections in any cont like written

in any contract or anything. They told us they would leave us alone and we just believed them. Um, and they did though. Our name at the time was Chaos Studios. We found out that we couldn't use that name. So, we changed our name and through a couple of um fake or false starts, we ended up winding up at Blizzard. And um the first game we ended up doing was Warcraft. So, Davidson bought you guys then and you were a wholly owned company of of Davidson. That's right. Okay. Now, to put this in a little bit more context, before that, we were super scrappy. Like, we were almost out of money. Like, we were just barely eating by to be able to like make payroll. We never missed a payroll. But, you know, we had gotten our parents to deposit $40,000, Allan and I, into a bank so that we could draw on a secured credit line.

When this all happened, that credit line was completely maxed out. Um, we did not have a local area network at the office. We were passing around floppy discs. We didn't use source control or anything. It was all completely manual. And so like getting acquired by Davidson Associates meant we immediately could upgrade to a LAN we could like get all this software that we couldn't afford to buy. So it immediately leveled us up overnight. How big was the company at that time? People wise probably 25 people or so. So they were sort of your bankroll publisher owner then at the time. Yeah. But then, you know, our first um really our first original Blizzard game was was Warcraft Orcs and Humans, and that came out that same year. Was that a pretty big commercial success? I mean, obviously, I know two and three small enough that it was a big enough success for us. Okay. Yeah. In terms of numbers today, probably

wasn't that big of a success. I think, you know, Warcraft 2 was a much bigger success. Okay. But I guess Davidson was like, "It's good enough. we want to see. Oh, yeah. I mean, they were very happy. It was it was a successful game. It's probably the last um game Blizzard released that didn't hit number one. Okay. So, Warcraft Warcraft 2 was kind of the evolution. That was like the breakout game. How long did it take to build two from one and it took about a year? Yeah. We launched one in um November of two of 94 and we launched two in December of 95. This tiny team. And then what what what happened? How did it blow up? With Warcraft 1, I think, you know, we had a lot of ideas that didn't make it into that game. And so Warcraft 2 was really just a a huge evolution and polish pass on everything that we're doing with uh Warcraft 1. You know, we

added uh land, sea, and air. So, we added boats to Warcraft 2 was higher resolution. We um added the fog of war. Um when you left an area, you could see the terrain but not the units. Did you guys do anything different on the go to, you know, marketing, distribution, etc. Like, you know, how much of a bigger hit was Warcraft 2 versus one? It was probably like an order of magnitude bigger. Oh, wow. Okay. Warcraft 1 was like a moderate moderate success. Warcraft 2 was sort of a big big hit. How did you all feel as like founders? I mean, I I'm assuming how did the economics work? Like how did you all feel like motivated and excited because obviously you were owned by Davidson at that point or even regret it later. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out is I don't know back then if it was different, but you know, it's it seems like you guys sold the company and then then had the big breakout hit.

Yeah. Well, at the time it felt like Davidson really gave us a um a huge head start. Yeah. So, like I don't think we could have it really accelerated us, you know. I don't know that we could have been able to focus on the games and building the team and doing all of that as quickly. you know, I mean, there's an alternate timeline somewhere, you know, where we can see what would have happened. But at the time, I didn't regret it. I just thought, okay, you know, this is great. Like, we were really happy where we were. We're making really great games. We're getting great acclaim. Our audience is growing. Um, and so it was about how do we make sure that we're able to reward the team? Yeah. Yeah. you know, and so there were a lot of conversations about um evolving our incentive structures and and all that, which went through a lot of different iterations over the years, but back then, I think we were super excited

about the reception. You work so hard on these games and you never really know how they're going to be received. So that that felt really good. Okay. So, at some point, did Blizzard like become bigger than David? I mean, it seems like it would been hu it would have been such a huge part of the business, right? Like Yeah. I don't think we really got to see that because like I said, Warcraft one in '94, Warcraft 2 in '95, Davidson sold to CC in 96. Ah, okay. That's where it is. Okay. And that was before Diablo came out. That was a string of a lot of change at our parent company because the Davidson sold to CUC and then CUC merged with HFS the following year to create Sendant and then Sendant found that CUC was not keeping its books properly and they ended up announcing that there was all this um they called it accounting irregularities in the CC side of the

business. um and they ended up selling off pretty much all the CUC assets um including software and that's how we wound up uh as part of Havas Interactive which was a division of Vivventi. So like there's like all this change happening and meanwhile we're just kind of trying to stay heads down focusing on like making our next games because we know that that's really going to determine um our future. It's going to determine whether or not we're able to preserve our autonomy and whether or not we can continue existing within this whole entity. But we didn't really get to see what would happen when Blizzard grew bigger than Davidson. I guess you all then went to Activision Blizzard. When was that in the timeline? That's not till much later. So 2004 is when World of Warcraft came out. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. at that time, you know, were part of Vivendi Games. So,

you know, back when Davidson sold to Cuc on the same day, Cuc also bought Sierra. Okay. And so, Sierra is kind of along on this ride as well. Um, Sierra went through a lot of different rounds of restructuring though along the way. And so, by the time World of Warcraft comes out, Blizzard business is doing great. um the Sierra side is kind of struggling. So, we kind of knew that at some point um Vivventi was going to uh decide it didn't want to be in the software business anymore. And they had already tried to sell software in the past. They weren't able to. Um but sort of as we get a little bit later 2006 2007 um we figured that um we should maybe play a more proactive role to try to um help navigate where we land up otherwise

we're just not going to have control over it. Yeah. Yeah. And you know at the time we looked around and we thought that Activision could be a really complimentary um business to us you know because if you think about the Blizzard business we were super strong on PC. We had this great um PC subscription business with World of Warcraft. We had you know other franchises really strong on PC. We were also very strong globally. We were one of the few American companies that was doing really well in Asia. um especially South Korea and China and you know Activision really strong on console, you know, and they had Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, um Call of Duty eventually. Yeah, eventually. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure when that hit, but it was sort of starting to be around that that time. But anyway, so we, you know, we were very open to that that idea. What were some of the like lessons about

Blizzard's culture that maybe like how did it seems like there were lots of obviously huge franchises built out of Blizzard Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft. It's like sequentially seems like over a 10-year period you guys were, you know, building some just obviously just legendary games. Like what as a leader, what what do you feel like were some of the key factors there? I think having uh really passionate teams that that were really excited about gaming. Um played a lot of games. We were always talking about, you know, games that were coming out and uh sort of where the future was going. Um there were always ideas percolating about like games that people really wanted to make. And so, um, it wasn't really often that a team freed up, you know, to be able to start working on a new game. But when that did happen, we would have these

ideas, um, you know, floating in the background and percolating. And I think we we um tried to match, you know, the business side of where we thought the business opportunities were and also um the gaps in the market where um it's like, oh man, you know, imagine a game that combines these elements. You know, nobody's ever really done this before and wouldn't that be awesome? and kind of iterating on those ideas and then when a team frees up, um we often found that the folks on the team, the leadership on the team was excited about doing the same thing that matched up with where we thought the market opportunity was, you know, and then I think probably 90% of the success is attributed to the execution because I mean there's plenty of great ideas, but Um, it's really a lot of it is how well

you execute against that. Um, I can tell you that there's almost no Blizzard games that I can think of where, you know, we knew what game we wanted to make, we made the game, and it went exactly as planned. That just never happened. we would head down a path and then we would become so much smarter and we'd learn, you know, what was working or what didn't work about that and we would alter course when needed, you know, and that often meant that things didn't ship as soon as we would like. Um, but we were what we were really committed to was making sure that when we did finally ship, it was something we were really proud of. I I guess how does that match with some of the business considerations like uh I mean Blizzard's kind of at least well I mean you said from Warcraft 2 to the sorry from Warcraft 1 to two was like one year of time which is obviously like

a fast rapid you know ship. Um, and then obviously Blizzard later on was well known for these really long cycles between sequels. Um, where seemingly, you know, some of the things that you were saying were maybe shifted directions and things got delayed and those kinds of things. Like how did you balance sort of hey we have to ship on this date because of some business consideration versus giving people that creative freedom to execute on something that I find it hard for even my team sometimes where sometimes they want to date because it helps them scope something phases that a project goes through right and so when you're in the earlier stages when you're kind of ideulating and experimenting and and things like that. I think we're a lot more flexible with dates because you're kind of learning what works and what doesn't. And until you really have a a view of the scope

and, you know, your goals for the project, it's really hard to kind of lock that down. And if you lock it in too early, then um it kind of feels like the game's not going to achieve its potential. Um, I think you always have a schedule and you always have goals that you're trying to hit. It's just do you prioritize the schedule or do you prioritize the quality of the project? And sometimes those things are in conflict later on as you're moving into production and you're learning, you know, how long things take, then it feels like you have a better sense for what is a reasonable date to actually lock in and ship this thing. The problem is until all the systems are in place and they're all interacting with each other, it's really hard to know how far you really are. And sometimes you get to the point where and often this is the case where the development

team thinks that they're done. They think they're ready, you know, and then they open it up and they let either the company play or even people outside the company play. And you start getting all this critical feedback of stuff and some of the stuff you know about and some of it you didn't really you don't really know about because you're too close to the project and everybody you know inside the company or especially inside the the game team knows what the intent is. They know what you expect the player to do and they're all doing those things. And then people who weren't involved in those decisions come in and they're doing completely different things. And sometimes they're doing things that are successful strategies but totally not fun, right? And so if you ship with where the most uh effective successful strategies are totally not fun, then your game is not fun. and you can ship like that and you you will have a unsuccessful game. You know,

those are the types of things that's imperative to fix. And I think that that's like a decision that you make because um you're up against a deadline and you know on the spreadsheet it says this is the day that you ship. Um and we've had to move those dates and it's hard to do every single time and it's very painful. But um I think that the cost of shipping with those types of existential problems is totally not worth it. Yeah. I guess I'm I'm like uh you know thinking about the culture of sort of like iteration and speed um versus sort of quality. And I guess some of the things I think about with I mean I'm right now I'm thinking about another company, you know, Bonfire that has a lot of this Blizzard DNA. um and um has been working on a game for a while. Um and and Rob I know has this you know culture that you know was

informed by Blizzard to some extent and obviously with the market shifting so fast in terms of you know player preferences shift uh platform shift uh and these kinds of things there's that angle of like we just have to sort of move fast and do you feel like that's changed at all with technology and the pace of things or is that um I guess how how does that inform I Now, even what you're doing with Dream Haven too as well, like um how have you has that evolved at all or is it still kind of that that sim similar philosophy that you've had? A lot has changed. Um, at Blizzard we were we were um developing our own game engines, our own tools, really our own everything, which added a lot of risk to the schedule, you know, because if there are problems with your engine, you've got to fix those problems, you know, and that was a big reason why um Starcraft, the original Starcraft um was delayed. Um, it was fortunate for us though because

some of those delays allowed us to iterate on the game design and we shipped a much better game when we shipped it than we would have had um we not run encountered some really difficult bugs to fix. Um, the fact that we're able to use Unreal and Unity, um, I think does reduce a lot of the risk in terms of at least technical feasibility risk of being able to, um, have solid, stable games that are that are running because these these engines are so well tested. And then you could, I guess, your follow-up question could be, okay, well then why is it still taking you so long? Yeah, exactly. Like games are taking even longer now. Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess it's because um we're all they're also the games themselves are becoming more complex, you know, and we're like we're filling filling the room with additional work. Can we go back a step? I'd love to

understand what you know inspired you to to get back into game man and and start Dream Haven. Well, I'll tell you, you know, when I left Blizzard, I did not have any kind of decisions in or any kind of plan in mind in terms of what I wanted to do next. Um, my wife Amy and I both left around the same time or at exactly the same time we left. Um, and we just started, we took a break, you know, we did some traveling and we just started writing down ideas that would come to mind. you know, we'd brainstorm different things, not only gaming, you know, anything. We're like, we can do anything. Let's write down a bunch of ideas and then we'll look at our list. And it turns out once once we had this list, most of our ideas were related to gaming, you know, and it's what we've been doing and it's what I know. And so, I guess it's not too surprising. Um, but the other thing we did is we

just started taking meetings with people. you know, people would always be reaching out, you know, hey, would you like to grab lunch? And um while I was at Blizzard, I would just say, "No, sorry. I don't have time unless it was related to what we were doing somehow." And after leaving, I was like, my default answer was, "Sure, let's grab lunch." You know, and I just hear about all these interesting things that people were doing. And and of course, we also got to talking with some of the um people we really loved working with at Blizzard all those years. And it turned out a number of them were also at a crossroads thinking about what they wanted to do next. And so I think the idea naturally came up like, hey, what if because some of our ideas were to create to create like an umbrella company like a central um team that could help independent developers um and support them, advise them um encourage them to focus on the things

that really matter to making the best games. Um, and we we thought, well, what if we joined forces and we tried to create something that's like a really great place for development teams to create great products. Um, and so that's what we ended up doing. And so we we have a founding team at Dream Haven that's very experienced. Um, they've been we many of them we've worked with for a couple decades at Blizzard. Very well-rounded across development and also different uh business functions. um you know and so the structure that we created was we had two internal wholly owned development studios Moonshot and Secret Door and a central team that's really there to support them and help them uh focus on the things they need to focus on to be successful. I guess in some ways it sounds like just a traditional publisher in some ways, right? um just from a from a extremely

top level. You could say that except that um the studio leadership, they're co-founders of Dream Haven and so they sit on our steering team. So it's like if you had a traditional publisher with your development studio leads as part of the call it a board for lack of a better term, we call it our steering team. Yeah. Um, so we're steering the company together and the central team exists really to support the studios and help them be successful, not really the other way around. Um, and then we also have our partner studio program which um where we've gone out and formed relationships with about a dozen indie developers and we've um taken a small equity stake in these companies and we're providing them advice and guidance and really kind of rooting for them to hopefully help them um as they encounter things that they've never encountered before. Are

there kind of any learnings from Blizzard that well maybe learnings in the sense that like uh in this next iteration of uh maybe we'll call it a modern take on publishing that you're taking with you and saying here here's something that we want to do a little bit differently or is it sort of taking the same DNA and creating a new maybe space for that like what's the what's the vision I guess for Dream Haven? Well, in terms of the developer publisher relationship, we view it more as a partnership. So, we're on the same team. I think that sometimes it doesn't always feel that way, you know, at different companies. And so, I think that that's pretty important because we are on the same team, right? Yeah. I think we learned a ton at Blizzard. Um, in some ways we're starting over because we don't have um this built-in community to market to, you know, we don't have an

owned platform with millions of active players. Um, and so and we don't have these great franchises that right u we've invested all of these years in. So we're we're really starting um starting over a little bit in that regard. um we're not starting over as much as we started the first time when we had none of that. Um and no experience, you know, and of course you've got great uh technology that lets us hit the ground running this time, you know, and you have the first party platforms and Steam. So, um in order to go to market, we don't need to have Battleet, but not having Battleet is a big disadvantage, I think. I guess I'm curious as uh as you start you're you're just getting to the point now obviously where you guys are launching your first games which is you know super super exciting. We're also in this place in the games industry right now where lots of these I

guess maybe like non AAA games but non-indie games are really struggling. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and even the whole idea of publishing as a whole is something that I don't even know what it means anymore is like that it seems like there's like tech companies that are sort of doing some publishing with like Amazon and Netflix and some of that, but your traditional like Activision or Take 2 or EA, they're not really necessarily investing in new games per se. Um, they're focused on their existing franchises. So, I guess like um as you think about sort of going to market with launching these games, what what kinds of things are you thinking about in terms of success? Like h how do you help maybe the industry or other studios think about what they might think about as I mean obviously you're going through the same journey that a lot of struggling folks are going through now. Yeah, we are and we're we're going through it this year really for the first time, right? Yeah. So, um, so I don't have

answers yet. You know, I think we we are certainly, um, trying to do the things to get the word out to create awareness around our games. It's a lot harder than it used to be. You know, it used to be very easy with, you know, where most of the people playing PC games read PC Gamer Magazine. Yeah. Um, you know, so you put an ad in PC Gamer Magazine, you get a review in PC Gamer Magazine and Computer Gaming World, and pretty much everybody who's interested knows. Um, now it's super fragmented. Um, and so, um, you know, I won't claim to be an expert on that. I think we're we're we're going out, we're trying to create awareness for the games. Um, I think the first step, you know, is create games that we're really proud of, that we think are really great. Um, and so, you know, this year we we have four games.

Um, by the end of the year, we'll have four games in the market. They're very different games. Um, what they have in common is they're all very, very good games. We're very proud of each of these games. I think they're very fun um in their respective genres. Um, and they're really fun to share with other people. So, um, that multiplayer aspect is is definitely there. Um, and hopefully we have a game for everyone, you know, regardless of what genre you're most interested in. And and then maybe we can start building a reputation that um, Dream Haven is getting behind games that are really good. And so if you liked one of them, maybe you'll be more likely to check out some of the other ones. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, it's it's one of those things where like you spoke a little bit about existing franchises. I'm like um there's something to Warcraft, Starcraft. Well, Diablo I feel like there's um I guess they're all just

very simple to understand. Like I think anybody could talk about Warcraft's just like fantasy, Starcraft, space, you know, it's like Diablo. You have the dungeon style kind they feel very like almost like first principle in their in the and it's just so big in terms of their ambition. Um did you have any thoughts on the the this new slate that you're coming up with like um how did you think about like genre and I you you talked a little bit about the formulas that you used in the past like where are the gaps um what are some of the genres? How did you think about that in this new slate? Yeah, so with the um with the internal studios, Moonshot and Secret Door. So when we first um made the decision to start up, we didn't start with any game ideas in mind. Um we started with a blank sheet of paper and both of those

um studios started brainstorming ideas. Um, and I think, you know, Moonshot went through many, many potential like one-pager pitches and they narrowed it down to their favorite top five. And then they spent two weeks each on each of the five kind of flushing out and answering some of the big questions and thinking through like what the game look loop looks like. um what the competitive landscape looks like, what's different and special about these ideas, and they pitched all five back to the company. And I think going through that process of, you know, doing the work and preparing the pitches back to the company, they settled on the one that they were most excited about, which coincidentally and thankfully was also the one that everybody else in the company was most excited about, you know, which turned into Wildgate. and um Secret Door went

through a similar process. And they ended up with Sunderfolk, two very very different games, but each each kind of unique and and um special in its own way. I think Sunfolk may be a bit more experimental because there's not really a analogous game that you can kind of look to and say, "Okay, this is how this type of game does." We we don't have that. But we also um when we were starting Dream Haven, we wanted the flexibility to be able to pursue some of these ideas that maybe the big publishers wouldn't pursue cuz they're not proven, you know, but inherently to us it sort of felt like there is this unexplored territory where um you could have multiplayer games, you know, using your phone as the controller with a deeper experience. than the types of party games that you find with like a

Jackbox. Um, and the technology is there to be able to do this really, really well. And so, you know, the team wanted to explore that and we're really excited about it. Yeah, it felt like, at least when I saw it, it felt like a multiplayer gloom haven style. Um, which yeah, it seemed like it was a very blue oceany experimental interesting space. So, I'm I'm really excited about that game and just to see the what the reception looks like. And yeah, I kind of wanted to touch on also a bit whether it's you started off this way or as you started building, you know, Dream Haven like sort of what you're doing differently this time around or any just sort of big tenants that you wanted to hold on to and and you know, you have and and that that has, you know, sort of been proven to be, you know, very helpful for the company, etc. I mean, I think that some of the things that um we want to hold on to are focus around, you know, building a brand that stands for quality gaming experiences, you know,

and so we would like to have people leave their interactions with these games thinking that, okay, you know, Dream Haven is getting behind really solid games, um, really fun games, and if Dream Haven's putting something out, we know it's going to be one of the top games that we should check out in that genre. I think in order to do that, that takes a lot of commitment from everybody at the company to commit to to that level of quality. Mhm. We have very experienced leadership on our studios and so um I think that's something that I mean certainly from the early days at Blizzard, you know, in the early Silicon Synapse days, we really didn't have a lot of experience. Um, and so we're hoping to leverage that experience to be able to, you know, we we kind of started out doing multiple things at the same time. And that's that's different. You know, we started uh we we really tried to focus on a very

small number of things or smaller projects anyway. Um, and then grew from there. I think we still believe that um you want to control complexity in the in the beginning so that you can build a foundation and layering complexity over time. And so right now our first efforts a lot of it is in building capability for the company um for the studios for the teams you know getting comfortable with different types of technology and then learning as much as we can along the way so that the next iteration we can layer in some of that complexity and build on what we've seen is working well. And then maybe one more on kind of the future in the industry. You know, what what excites you about where the industry is headed? Obviously, you know, understand there's bumps along the way and um and yeah, even thinking about if you want to concentrate into sort of what the quoteunquote best game of the next 10 years would be and you what do

you think it would do differently? You know, what do you think would be kind of novel and fresh, you know, that that you're sort of excited about coming up in this next 10 10 15 years? I think technology has always been a a big factor in helping to drive innovation. I think throughout the if you look at the Blizzard games and the evolution of the Blizzard games, you can point to evolution in technology and us trying to be creative about how we leverage that technology to evolve the different genres. And I think that that will continue to be the case. I do think that there's something to this sort of cross-platform interaction that we're exploring with Sunderfolk games accessibility of games to be played from anywhere on different devices on mobile devices streamed. You know, I think we're still kind of at the early stages of figuring out what kind of experiences can be delivered um from

the cloud, streamed to any device. Um I think there's a whole element of streaming directly to your TV, you know, where your TV is just accepting those things but having it be very deep interactive experiences. You know, of course, we're at the early stages of AI and leveraging AI to actually enhance the enhance gameplay. I'm sure that there's going to be things that happen there that impact all of like every aspect of our lives, but also games. Yeah. Are you guys just to follow up on the AI front? Um, are you all I'm not I'm less interested in maybe like the the tooling side, but more around how it might inform some of the design or the areas of exploration. Um, maybe new mechanics that you can explore or that are opening up. Are you I I've sometimes I maybe struggled I I guess

with particularly with people on my team that have shipped games for a long time to get them to try I mean funny enough even though we have a whole company of technologists um sometimes to get them to explore a new way to do something. Um, I I guess is there a way that you've been able to encourage obviously industry veterans that have been shipping games for a long time in a a certain way to explore a new mechanic using obviously I mean we're all aware that there's a shift in technology happening whether we we like it or not at this stage um we really aren't um down the path at all on leveraging AI on in game like playerf facing experiences. Um it really is mostly from the um the tooling pipeline style. Yeah. Tooling and also just even um helping to

organize thinking and processing you know maybe processing data or um you know policies and procedures. It's it's great. It's a huge help. Yeah. Um, but uh I think maybe more more than anything we're just kind of watching to see how this evolves. Yeah, I'm sure like you said, some very young person will come up with some very new way of new mechanic that we've never thought of before that will open up a whole new design space for for everyone. All right. Shall we do a lightning round now? Sure. What's maybe one piece of media that you've consumed consumed recently uh that you like like book, TV show, movie, anything like that? Well, I mean the most recent thing um I've been introducing my wife and daughter to Star Trek, like going through all the different series and

everything. And we just finished Voyager and they absolutely loved it. I think it's their favorite so far, which was a surprise to me. Um, and all they want to do is rewatch the whole series. And so we're in our second watching. It's now my third watching. Wow. I mean, and it actually holds up surprisingly well. What about a favorite game you're playing right now or or recently? I'm playing a lot of Mechabellum, but I guess you want to talk about maybe a game that's not on our not from Dream Haven. Um, we loved It Takes Two. And the next thing I'm going to play when I have a chance is Split Fiction. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Amazing. Yes. Top of my lift list as well. What about is there a I mean you've worked with us obviously created and you know worked with some incredible IP. Is there a dream IP that you would want to work with? I don't know if there's one. Um I think that you know I'm a big fan of Marvel. I think it's one of the be best IPs around. I think Star Trek is a great IP.

We need a we need a good Star Trek game. We haven't really seen anything like that before from a game Star Wars games, but uh that's what I was going to say. What's your favorite way to relax? Pickle ball. Did you pick that up during co or was that uh a little bit before COVID, but definitely after CO. So, in the last couple of years, I've got got the bug. Then I got planter fasciitis and that is disturbing my pickle ball career. Um, how about your biggest lesson from a mentor? I've got a few lessons um from Alan Atam, who's really my mentor getting into this industry. Um, really early on, he said a few things that stuck with me. Um, one is building credibility, being successful is really not that hard. Just do what you say you're going to do. I think that that's a good one. I think another one is um because when I first started doing this, it was so

overwhelming. The the projects were so much bigger than anything I had seen before. And um I remember being very very discouraged one day and kind of going to him and saying, "Hey, I I don't even know where to start here." And he said, "Look, it's totally normal to feel overwhelmed when you're faced with a new project, which is totally true. Don't try to solve it all at once. Break it down into small bite-sized pieces and solve them one at a time. And that has worked over and over again. That's your productivity hack. There you go. There you go. Uh, and Mike, we always end with this cornerstone question. Um, and you know, this might be a two-parter for you. If you could go back to the founding of, you know, Blizzard as well as the founding of Dream Haven and and give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be? Um, and you know, frankly, would it be different? Actually, well, let me go back to the founding of Blizzard. I think maybe two things I would whisper in my ear. I would say

number one, try to stay independent for as long as possible. Number two, Dota. [Laughter] Oh, that is a amazing way to end uh this uh this session. Thank you so much for for the the time, Mike. It was really cool to hear about the story. Thank you for having me. That was fun. [Music]