| Hi everyone. Today we're diving into some of the secrets behind Blizzard's success, but first... This week's top gaming news: - Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Ubisoft Entertainment SA's founding Guillemot family are considering options including a potential buyout of the French video-game developer
- Epic Games Inc. accused Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Samsung Electronics Co. of conspiring to block rival apps
- Microsoft Corp. wants to know why developers are skipping Xbox
Blizzard Entertainment was once the most beloved video-game company in the world not named Nintendo. But in recent years, its reputation has plummeted. My new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (out on Oct. 8) tells the whole 33-year story, from the company's humble beginnings to its absorption into Microsoft's Xbox in a staggering $69 billion deal. (Don't miss Bloomberg's Screentime conference in Los Angeles next week, where I'll be interviewing Blizzard Co-Founder Mike Morhaime about his new gaming company, Dreamhaven.) Over the last few days, I've been doing a press tour for my book, and unsurprisingly, many of the headlines and questions have centered on the negative — the wild twists and turns that led to the company's fall from grace. So in this week's column I wanted to focus on the positives. Because Blizzard, for all of its flaws and mistakes, has developed hit after hit. It has created five franchises that could all be considered cultural phenomena: Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Hearthstone and Overwatch. Most companies would kill for just one of those. Blizzard's games have reached hundreds of millions of people and generated billions of dollars in profit. People have met lifelong friends and even spouses inside of Blizzard games and at the company's dedicated fan convention, BlizzCon. After talking to more than 300 current and former Blizzard employees for my book, I've got a few thoughts on how they did it. Here are some of the secrets to the company's success. Players over profits It sounds like naive idealism, one of those hippie-dippie slogans you might read on a Subaru bumper sticker. But one of Blizzard's core values was always that if you put players first, the profits will follow, and for decades their games lived up to that promise. The most telling early example of this philosophy was the company's online platform, Battle.net, which was released in 1996. Back in the 1990s, playing PC games on the burgeoning internet required you to use services like General Electric's GEnie, which charged by the hour. Blizzard's employees, who hated having to pay for online gaming, decided to make their own service free (with costs defrayed by advertisements), and it helped turn games such as Diablo and StarCraft into worldwide sensations. Players appreciated that they weren't being nickel-and-dimed, and they grew to love the Blizzard brand as a result. When it's ready Later that same year, Blizzard learned a valuable lesson when it failed to deliver Diablo before Christmas. Previously, conventional wisdom had been that if a game didn't make it in time for holiday gift buying, it would flop. But Diablo came out on the last day of 1996 yet still sold more than one million copies, giving Blizzard a new mantra: Don't release games. Only release them when they're ready. This philosophy would lead to some problems much later, but it resulted in better games. Players quickly learned that although Blizzard games might be late, they were always polished and felt complete. Iterate rather than invent Blizzard's most successful games didn't create new genres. Rather, they took games that already existed and made them even better. In 1993, everyone at the company was obsessed with a strategy game called Dune II, but they wished that it had a multiplayer mode. So they came up with Warcraft, which took Dune II's gameplay but made it feel more approachable and added new features that they wanted, such as the ability to play against one another — a pulse-pounding experience that was far more compelling than battling the computer. In 1999, everyone at the office grew addicted to the online game EverQuest, but they had gripes about its opacity and unfriendly features. So they decided to make their own version, cataloging everything they didn't like about EverQuest and making it better. Five years later, they released World of Warcraft, and it became one of the most lucrative and popular video games of all time. Throw out what doesn't work Blizzard's executives once estimated that they have canceled some 50% of the game projects they've kicked off — although I suspect that today the percentage is even higher. Knowing when to cut bait instead of releasing a boring or inferior product was another key part of Blizzard's success, and some of its most successful games have come from discarded projects. In the late 1990s, Blizzard was working on a project called Nomad with no clear vision or coherent design. Ditching that led to World of Warcraft. Later, Blizzard would spend seven years on Titan — a disastrous project that would have serious repercussions for the company. But when they finally canceled it, a small team stayed behind and came up with Overwatch, which became one of the best-selling games of all time. Play the game constantly You'd be shocked how many stories I hear from game companies whose employees simply don't play the game they're developing. Maybe the build is too unstable, or maybe the culture just doesn't encourage it. Whatever the reason, it can ultimately lead to a development team failing to see the problems in their product. At Blizzard, playtesting was always essential. The company would hold sessions in which every single person at the company — from the CEO to the office receptionist — would stop everything they were doing and play whatever game they were working on. Then, they'd all talk about what they liked and didn't like, using those lessons to make the game better. The biggest indication that a game would be a hit was when staff were playing it even during their spare time. During the development of World of Warcraft, a producer had to get on the office intercom and tell everyone they needed to stop playing so much and get back to actually making the thing. That was when they knew it was going to be big. I'm still making my way through The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, although I must confess that I'm a little underwhelmed. This new Zelda game is the first to let you play as the eponymous princess, but she doesn't have a sword and shield like her colleague Link. Rather, she can use a magical rod to summon monsters and objects, then use those to attack enemies and solve puzzles. This encourages creativity in exploration and puzzle-solving, which is delightful, but it also makes combat feel like a chore. When you're surrounded by random enemies on the overworld, you have to fiddle through menus and hope that the Moblin you just summoned will actually throw his spear in the right direction. I'm two dungeons in, and while I plan to keep playing and give it more time to impress me, so far I'm a little disappointed. | 
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