In an article I wrote about leakers/rumour mongers a few years ago, I briefly mentioned Jewish gaming journalist Jason Schreier for his involvement in the outing of a leaker that inspired that post. I stated in the post that he is no better than those he described as “anonymous video-game rumormongers” but he is arguably much worse. Anyone who has followed video game culture for long enough would have at least heard his name and likely in relation to websites like Kotaku and NeoGAF. He has been at Bloomberg for a few years and has also published a number of books on the gaming industry. I have read one titled Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which covers the development of a number of significant games released (and unreleased), in the previous decade. For the genre, it wasn’t a bad read but was mostly just a few long-form articles stitched together into a book.
His most recent book was published in October last year and is titled Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. The main subject is one of the great, if not the greatest American game developer and probably the only one that can be directly compared with Nintendo in terms of quality and influence. The book is about “the rise, fall and future” of the company according to the optimistic subtitle. I don’t how closely this matches the contents as I haven’t read it because it is not available in my local library and I’m not buying a copy. If the author would like to send me a review copy, I’d be happy to read it and give my take; which would likely involve me quoting large sections of the text and critiquing what is written while also making fun of him. I don’t expect the author to take me up on this though so instead, I’m going to take a leaf from the journalist’s handbook and rely on “a source” which I will link to below.
Before proceeding, I thought it might be helpful to detail some of my history with Blizzard Entertainment because they were one of my favourite developers growing up — even when I didn’t know it. This would place Blizzard with Sega, Nintendo, Westwood, Sir-tech and id Software. The latter three were and still are mostly associated with PC and Blizzard and id Software are the only two associated with the platform that still exist. My first experience with a Blizzard game was when they were known as ‘Silicon & Synapse, Inc.’ with their title Rock n’ Roll Racing which released for both Sega Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo. This was a favourite in my household though it is unfortunately one that doesn’t hold up as well today. This was before they became much better known for their PC games.
As a teenager, I spent a lot more time on PC than console and StarCraft which released in 1998, was one of the most significant of these games during this period. I played through the original release and the Brood War expansion and it briefly eclipsed Westwood’s Command & Conquer as my favourite real-time tactical game. I was aware of the WarCraft series and later played through WarCraft II and III (though not the original). I never got into Diablo though I have played the first three games in the series. I was not among the many millions of World of Warcraft players though a close friend did at least get me into a trial during my university days. So my experience with the company goes back very early through to StarCraft II and Diablo III early last decade.
Blizzard’s success didn’t stop with these titles and they saw further success with titles like Hearthstone in 2014 and Overwatch in 2016. They have released other games since but there was a notable drop in quality around this period and there has been nothing of note besides two sequels and a number of remasters since 2016. This is not a coincidence as it was also around this time that they had foolishly embraced DEI which has seen the company decline significantly in a rather short time. For a company that once had a reputation for never releasing a bad game, this is quite significant.
In 2021, there was a lawsuit filed in California against Activision Blizzard which had Jason Schreier’s reporting all over it. This is easy to verify as his name appears thirteen times in this Wikipedia article on the lawsuit and all of this coverage obviously contributed to the book mentioned above. The lawsuit was ultimately “settled for $54 million without any admission of wrongdoing” on Activision Blizzard’s part. As the linked article also stated, it was also openly used as a vehicle for unionising the gaming industry.
From what I know of modern law and lawsuits, defendants will often opt for a settlement as the cheapest way out of trouble; regardless of the merit of the suit. This is not how I’d want to go about it were I in the same position but it seems that this is the way it is generally done and especially so in the corporate world. Even if you’re 100% in the right, a lawsuit can cost you a lot more time and money than a begrudging settlement and so it seems this is exactly what happened.
Although the lawsuit concluded a few years ago, it recently came into the news again which is where my “source” comes into it. My source is a tweet which I will quote in full in case it is ever lost or deleted:
Blizzard was a game developer that was so popular that they used to have their own annual ComicCon style convention where fans from all over the world would come to meet the developers of their favorite games and learn what new stuff was coming.
Then, an unhappy faction who didn’t like the “frat house” atmosphere made a bunch of largely false allegations at the height of #MeToo. Lawyers were brought in to investigate, and they found email chains discussing the “Cosby Suite,” which was the hospitality suite at the convention hotel that Blizzard developers named for its carpets that looked like a Bill Cosby sweater.
These emails were from years before Cosby’s sexual assault conviction, but they were considered damning at the time and it was insinuated in the media that the men on the email chain were committing rape in the “Cosby Suite,” entirely because of the name.
Everyone on the email chain — men who had worked at Blizzard for decades and built the Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft franchises — were fired in disgrace over this.
Alex Afrasiabi had his name stripped out of World of Warcraft. An Overwatch character named after veteran Blizzard developer Jesse McCree was renamed in the game. These guys did absolutely nothing wrong except joke with their friends in emails they never expected to be exposed as part of a witch hunt.
In the wake of the mass firings of veterans game designers, the entire culture of Blizzard changed as an institution, and the games changed too — for the worse. “World of Warcraft” became a cozy fantasy coffee shop game. “Overwatch” became a gay pride game. Nobody would go to a convention these days to celebrate these games or the people who now work on them.
The false sexual assault allegations were a pretense for a crowd of disgruntled nonbinary weirdos to seize the greatest game studio in the United States, but without the people they purged and replaced, they could not uphold Blizzard’s once legendary standard of quality and the studio collapsed into irrelevance.
When you see gamers celebrating mass layoffs at game studios, it is because things like this happened across the gaming industry. The hobby was conquered and transformed by people who believed gaming needed to change. But they changed it into something nobody wants to pay for, and now they’re all losing their jobs.
To do my due diligence as a reporter, I am also linking to Jason Schreier’s response to this and/or other tweets which he is completely dismissive of in the opening minutes of the video. If you can stand looking at his face or just listening to his voice for longer than I did, you might find out more.
For my part, there isn’t really anything glaringly wrong with the contents of this tweet though I’m sure if I looked into it, I’d find he got a few details wrong that have little impact on the overall truth of what he’s written. As we know from the settlement, there was no admission of wrongdoing required to settle the lawsuit which wouldn’t be so if it was justice that was genuinely being sought. They were dealing with a California state government department that had plenty of taxpayer money to lose and so could have insisted on such an admission. The long-term problem with settling is that regardless of the truth, it is seen as evidence that there was something to answer for.
The one thing I assume Schreier and I agree on is that Blizzard being purchased by Activision was never going to be good for the developer. Having watched their close competitor Westwood Studios get chewed and spat out by Electronic Arts, there was little doubt the same would eventually happen to Blizzard. The last decade of releases backs this up with lots of re-releases of games that made them famous and nothing new or innovative.
I don’t know if Schreier thinks the future of Blizzard is looking bright but I expect to see a slow, embarrassing death. Activision will continue to milk what they can out of existing franchises before it is shutdown and the intellectual property is all that remains of one of the greatest developer’s of computer games. It’s sad but it has been seen over and over again and Blizzard wasn’t the first and they certainly won’t be the last.