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One of the things I think has been important for Blizzard is maintaining the direct relationship with our players. Having a platform that we owned and controlled was important for that strategy, and also to not be dependent on other publishers.
Michael Morhaime
I'd been with Blizzard for almost 28 years when I stepped down.
I think people are interested in watching what they know and what they care about, so as you have more people where gaming is a huge part of their life, they want to see what the top players in the world are able to do.
The cool thing about 'Hearthstone' is, in terms of accessibility to competitive play, it's very accessible. Anybody can participate in these types of things.
The popularity of eSports was inevitable.
ESports is a big part of 'StarCraft II', and I think it adds a lot of longevity to the game.
'Starcraft' is a fairly strategic game with depth.
Focus is so important when you're making games.
'Starcraft' was never designed to support multi-byte languages. In order to support more complicated languages like Korean or Chinese, you need two bytes of storage and 'Starcraft' only had one byte.
I am surprised by the level of toxicity sometimes that exists online, especially where people can say things anonymously.
If we were to choose to do something on a console, the merger with Activision is going to be extremely helpful.
From a development standpoint, at Blizzard Entertainment one of our values of course is commitment to quality.
We've always had a cultural commitment to reach as many players as we could.
Live streaming has been huge in eSports.
Blizzard has definitely evolved around crunch. In our early days, we crunched crazy hours to get the games done.
I've met several times with the Activision guys and we've talked at length about Blizzard's philosophy on game development and game publishing and all the things that are important to us at Blizzard. We found that we shared a lot of the same values.
We'd really like for BlizzCon to be something that the people who really really want to go, if this is something you're really passionate about, you want to be here at BlizzCon, we'd like it to be possible for you to get here. When we are selling out in a couple seconds, it's really not possible for a lot of people that really want to come.
There's the saying that perfect is the enemy of great, because if you strive for perfection you'll maybe never ship. There's a point that's good enough. But I do think that there's so much competition out there that if you don't hit the quality bar, the product will just fail.
I have a great time playing 'Overwatch.'
I think every year we get better at running BlizzCon. The scale of the event is so large and I think people appreciate the logistics involved in putting on such an event.
I think if you're a small studio, you're living or dying by the success of the next project, it takes a lot of superhuman effort - or at least it did for us.
The development of gaming in Asia usually serves as the marker for how their company predicts the development of gaming will go globally.
I think that gaming is more fun when you're playing with people that you know.
We're thrilled to see eSports continue to grow in popularity around the world.
We want gaming and e-sports to be something that is welcoming and appropriate for everybody who wants to come and watch.
One of the design goals for 'Starcraft 2' was to factor in better features that would make a better viewing experience for e-sports.
Ultimately the only way to win is to create great games.
We love BlizzCon. It's great. It's our favorite thing to do. But first and foremost, we're a game company, and we have to make sure we deliver good quality games for our players.
Blizzard has moved into this mode of continuous development. We're contributing a lot of content to our games to keep them evolving.
One thing we wanted to take from traditional sports with 'Overwatch League' - we have city-based teams. There aren't really any other models where you have a global city-based league. But you do have teams that are based in a location.
E-sports used to be this niche thing. We knew it was really cool, but outside of a very narrow audience you really didn't get a lot of exposure.
I used to be the guy that sat in the back.
It was controversial when we were settling on what the races should be in 'Warcraft 3!'
There's no such thing as 'next time we'll do it better.' Do it better this time.
With a very small team you can create compelling content and reach a large audience.
We created BlizzCon as a celebration of our global community, but not everyone can travel to the show, so the virtual ticket gives us a great way to bring BlizzCon to gamers around the world.
As our players have become more experienced playing 'World of Warcraft' over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content.
As a spectator eSport, I think 'StarCraft' is really exciting, engaging, and interesting to watch. As a player, it just really has something for everybody.
If you're going to create a competitive game and it's going to be popular, you have to have an esports ecosystem around the game.
Of course, we create a lot of heroes. But the real intention of that is to make the player feel like a hero in all of our games.
The great thing about 'World Of Warcraft' is that you can sit down in your lunch hour and do a couple of quests and still feel like you've had a meaningful experience, rather than it feeling like you've got a second career.
Asia is the founding land of competitive gaming.
You should take your reputation very seriously and try to build a track record you can be proud of.
When we look back, what we often find that's most lasting and meaningful from our experiences in games are the relationships we create and foster.
What's really interesting is when you see players using tactics or combinations of units that we'd never even thought of.
Well, the team that created 'Starcraft 2' is probably the most experienced real-time strategy team in the industry - there are members of that team who have worked on all our RTS games going back to 'Warcraft.'
Activision is structured with independent studios and they give their independent studios quite a bit of autonomy.
Our original mission and values consisted of four simple words that formed our foundation: 'We make great games.' We crafted that statement before we had even released our first game, but we were committed to living up to it.
If you put smart creative people in a room together, great things are possible.
Sacrificing high quality for speed, it just isn't worth it.
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