| Hi everyone. Surprise! You're getting two newsletters this week starting with a special interview today, but first... This week's top gaming news: In 2020, Blizzard Entertainment Co-Founder Mike Morhaime, his wife Amy and a group of their former colleagues announced a new video-game company called Dreamhaven. Over the past four years, they've largely kept out of the spotlight. But now, they're ready to talk — and they plan to announce their first video game next month. I'll be interviewing Morhaime on Oct. 10 at Bloomberg's second annual Screentime conference in Los Angeles. (Hope to see you there!) Meanwhile, I recently spoke to him and two other Dreamhaven leaders about what they've been up to. Dreamhaven, based in Irvine, California, is both a video-game publisher and developer. It plans to bring a handful of external games to market while also operating two internal studios, Secret Door and Moonshot, which will be making their own games. The Morhaimes, who have taken on outside investment, maintain the majority ownership of the company. For the couple and their team, this is an opportunity to try to recreate the magic that turned Blizzard into one of the most beloved companies in gaming — with hits such as World of Warcraft and Overwatch — while avoiding some of the mistakes that hurt its reputation in recent years. "When we started Blizzard, we really had no idea what we were doing," Mike Morhaime told me. "This is a much more experienced leadership team." Morhaime and partner Allen Adham founded Blizzard in 1991, and it took them years to turn it into a professional company with a human-resources department. Throughout the 1990s, its workforce was almost entirely made up of men — a frat-house-like culture that eventually morphed into something worse. In 2021, California filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against its parent company, setting off a series of events which eventually led to Microsoft Corp. purchasing the business for $69 billion. The lawsuit was later settled for more than $54 million. "It's very important for us to build a diverse and inclusive environment at Dreamhaven," Morhaime said. The company has around 100 staff members, and 37% identify as women or non-binary. (By comparison, Blizzard was at around 20% when Morhaime was last in charge. Activision Blizzard said in 2023 that 26% of its staff identified as women or non-binary.) Today's news is that Dreamhaven is publishing Lynked: Banner of the Spark, a multiplayer action game, from an external studio called Fuzzybot, that will enter early access in a few weeks. Dreamhaven also said that in October it will announce its first internally developed game from Secret Door, a shop led by Blizzard veteran Chris Sigaty.  Blizzard veteran Chris Sigaty is the head of Secret Door, one of Dreamhaven's two internal studios. Photographer: Dreamhaven, Inc. Sigaty, who spent more than 23 years at Blizzard and was the executive producer of StarCraft II, said that his team started off with "a blank slate" and were told to come up with ideas. "We made multiple small pitches to ourselves first, whittled them down, talked to Dreamhaven about what we were inspired by, then we made a decision," he said. By the end of 2020, they'd come up with a plan for a project inspired by board and tabletop games. But a few months later things got upended when the leader of the project, Eric Dodds, another Blizzard veteran best known for directing the massive hit Hearthstone, decided to resign for personal reasons. To replace Dodds, they promoted Erin Marek, who had previously worked for Riot Games and Electronic Arts Inc. Although she had less experience than many of her colleagues, "Erin was a perfect choice," Sigaty said, "for many reasons that will become clear as we talk about our game." Unlike many of her peers at the studio, Marek had never worked at Blizzard or even played its games before she started — giving her a different perspective than colleagues such as Morhaime and Sigaty. While Blizzard tended to promote tenured veterans and never had a female creative director, Dreamhaven is taking a different approach. "For me, it's awesome to have a seat at the table, even without the background that's as accoladed as them," Marek said. The project has already faced a few struggles. Between the director shift, the challenges of starting a new outfit during the pandemic and other typical game development woes, Secret Door's new game missed multiple deadlines. All of which is reminiscent of Blizzard, which became infamous for pushing back games and promising to release them "when they're ready." It's an ethos that over the years helped to make Blizzard a hitmaker, able to devise billion-dollar franchises such as Diablo and StarCraft. But it also led to conflicts between Blizzard and Activision Blizzard's then-CEO Bobby Kotick, its predictability-loving boss — a fraught dynamic that I document extensively in my new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, which comes out on Oct. 8. In this week's interview, Morhaime hinted at the divide, saying that part of Dreamhaven's founding mantra was to form a company "where our creators could focus on the things they want to focus on, that fosters creativity and innovation, without some of the corporate pressures and restrictions that you often find in bigger companies."  Erin Marek is the director of Dreamhaven's first internally developed game Photographer: Dreamhaven, Inc. Still, they need to ship a game, and Sigaty said their first title will be out at some point next year. "I think the magic of being here — and part of the values I share deeply with Mike — is that you hurt yourself worse putting something out that's not ready than if you take the right time to make sure it's correct," he said. Avoiding comparisons with Blizzard, which employs thousands of people and generates billions of dollars in annual revenue, may be a challenge for Dreamhaven in the years ahead. Last month, the gaming company Frost Giant released a new title to mixed reviews, in part because it was going head-to-head with Blizzard's StarCraft II. With much smaller teams and budgets, Morhaime's new company will have to calibrate player expectations to ensure people know that their games won't be quite as humongous as, say, Hearthstone or Diablo IV. "The size of these games probably are not going to be the size of a Blizzard game," Morhaime said. "But the quality bar we're trying to hit is still there. We're trying to still put out high-quality, polished games that people can love and enjoy and share with their friends." | 
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