Play fair

A gripping report on the dark fate of a famous gaming studio.

For every video game fan, Blizzard Entertainment used to be synonymous with perfection. The company was founded in the early nineties by a few friends fresh out of university, and just a few years later, it was known worldwide for what are now classics, such as the Diablo series and World of Warcraft. However, the brand won the hearts of gamers primarily thanks to its development principle that the joy of playing comes before everything else. The passion project gradually transformed into an empire with thousands of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets, which was eventually swallowed by the even larger corporation, Activision. The studio's autonomy was not to last – it took just one major stumble and one cancelled project for the parent company to start dismantling Blizzard from within. Bad games, mishandled PR, and mass lay-offs followed. Blizzard became synonymous with decline. In his book Play Nice, Jason Schreier draws on interviews with more than three hundred current and former employees to tell the compelling story of a company that was always more than just a gaming studio.

A drama that rivals the series Succession.
— The Wall Street Journal

Part of Blizzard's history is very well documented, but even the most devoted fans have never gotten answers to a number of fundamental questions. How did Adham and Morhaime transform Blizzard into a video game empire with its own 20,000m2 campus and revenues in the billions of dollars? What was the real story behind the complicated development of Diablo, the rise and fall of StarCraft in South Korea, and the notoriously cancelled project known by the codename Titan? [...] How did such a revered company, which could get thousands of people to stand in long queues just to hear Blizzard developers talk about upcoming titles, become embroiled in a lawsuit of unprecedented proportions? This book offers answers to all these questions and many more.
— extract from the book