Jason Schreier is a journalist who writes about the games industry for Bloomberg, the author of three books: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, and his latest, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment which released on October 8th of this year. Schreier spoke with Minus World about the challenge of writing a book that spans the length of a legendary developer like Blizzard, the industry at large, and more.
Minus World: What’s the game that you’ve enjoyed the most this year?
Jason Schreier: I want to say Rebirth(Final Fantasy VII Rebirth), but there are a few contenders. Rebirth, Animal Well, Balatro, and there’s one game I’m playing right now that I’m only like 10-ish hours in, but it might wind up being my game of the year. Metaphor: ReFantazio, I’m playing that right now for review and it is awesome. I love it. It’s like fantasy Persona. It rules.
MW: What’s the origin story for you wanting to write this book?
Schreier: I started working on this a couple months before the release of my last book, Press Reset. So around the spring of 2021 is when I started formulating the idea, and I sent an email to my editor and my agent being like, “Hey, this is what I want to do next.” To which they said, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.” After Press Reset and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, my last two books, they were both anthology stories, compilations of different kinds of stories, I wanted to do a book that was one big story, and there are a lot of ways you can go about that if you’re covering the video game industry: you could look into a specific company, you could look into a specific person, whatever it is. And what really triggered this particular book for me was thinking about looking back at what started happening in like 2017, 2018. Which is when Activision, the corporate parent of Blizzard, really started getting involved in Blizzard’s operations in a way that stood out to me, and I was reporting on it a little bit at the time. Mike Morheim, who was the co-founder of the company and CEO of Blizzard for a long time, he stepped down kind of without saying why. And I thought, “There’s a bigger story here.” It also helped that I was a big fan of Blizzard growing up. I played a ton of Warcraft II and StarCraft and Diablo II. I was very familiar with the games, but in general, just being a fan of a company or a game is not enough for me to want to spend my time writing a book about it or or really researching it extensively. There has to be an interesting story there. And the more I started looking at people and doing research, the more I realized that not only was this Activision saga fascinating, there’s also all sorts of wild details, some of which have been reported, some of which haven’t, not all of which have been gathered and compiled into one coherent narrative. That led to me being like, “Yeah, man, this is a book.” and then a few months later, the California lawsuit hit. California sued Activision Blizzard for sexual harassment and misconduct. I said, “Oh my God, talk about a twist to the saga.I can’t believe that this happened, that all these women were feeling this way.” It was wild. And then Microsoft bought them, and it was just one thing after another as I was diving into the book. It was quite a saga.
MW: Even on a surface level that’s compelling stuff, right? You have this studio who’s wildly influential and then gradually becomes integrated more and more into this stiff corporate culture. And then you find out, well, maybe things weren’t always as good there as we thought they might have been, even before Activision got their tendrils into the upper management.
Schreier: Yeah, 100%. When I’m doing nonfiction, I’m doing reporting and journalism. I don’t really believe in heroes and villains. I believe in people with different ethos and ways they look at the world and complexities, and I think that it’s a much more interesting story when it isn’t good guy Blizzard against bad guy Activision. And it’s kind of like, “Hey, even though a lot of people love Blizzard and love their philosophies in many ways. And the way that they make games and many of the hits and franchises they made, there was some rot here too”. And it’s worth talking about that. Maybe when Activision came in and they said, “Hey, we should change some things here”. Maybe they weren’t all wrong. Maybe they were wrong in some ways, but not others. So, what I tried to do with the book is explore that nuance and complexity and paint a picture that isn’t just good versus evil
MW: I think you do a good job of that, because you read about people who have no background in games that were just friends with Bobby Kotick. Or people from Honeywell or places where they have no frame of reference for the products that they’re going to be working on, but they have this particular skill that they’re looking to exploit to grow untapped revenue streams or something, that’s what seems to be a running theme.
Schreier: Yeah, but it’s interesting and I think something worth noting. There was always this tension from the very beginning way before Activision stepped in, there was this tension between Blizzard, a company run by gamers, and companies that were run by non-gamers where people didn’t care about games. I think there’s something really interesting there, and I know it’s just a little thing, but there’s a moment early on in the book when Blizzard North is negotiating a deal, –Blizzard North is another company also run by gamers and not businesspeople, not suits– And they negotiate a deal, and they wind up signing what David Brevik, the president of the company, calls like the worst contract in the history of contracts. And part of that is because they didn’t have a suit. And sometimes the suits actually know what they’re doing. Sometimes you need a suit or a suit’s ethos and their experience. Throughout the book, I try to make it clear that there isn’t one side that’s right and one side that’s wrong. There are a lot of different perspectives and ways you could go about this, but they’re also extremes. This is a story of extremes. I think that people will read Bobby Kotick’s philosophy about how to run a gaming business and what he calls “exploiting franchises”, and most people who play games are like, “Oh my God, not every franchise needs to be released every single year, this is enough already”.
MW: When the line must go up.
Schreier : Right, the predictability needs to be there. I think just looking at that kind of dichotomy, it’s really incredible that Blizzard and Activision wound up smushed together because they really couldn’t be more opposite.
MW: Do you think when Blizzard was in the process of merging with Activision that Bobby Kotick had a long-term plan that they would be able to erode enough of the culture at Blizzard to make it mesh better with Activision? Because a key point of the merger was that Blizzard would retain their autonomy even though they have this parent company. And for a long time that was true and then they fumbled. Do you feel like they were just waiting for something like that to happen because this industry is so unpredictable, and you can put out a good product and still have it fail?
Schreier: No, I don’t think Bobby Kotick thinks like that. I think he saw Blizzard as this incredible company because they had WoW which was growing, and growing more every single year. They had other franchises that seemed at the time to be ripe for what he would call exploiting in StarCraft and Diablo, they had a lot of hits. I think he would have been thrilled if they were transformed into a WoW company and released a new WoW expansion every year. He would have loved that. I don’t think it was his goal to erode Blizzard’s culture back then because things were moving pretty well.
I think Titan changed a lot of things for the company and changed a lot about the way that Bobby looked at them, and his view of whether they were actually successful. Because when you have something like Titan, and remember it was an early, early concept when the Activision Blizzard merger happened and it was promised internally to investors and shareholders, executives, and boards of directors as Blizzard’s next big thing. The spiritual successor to WoW, and the next big thing that was going to make them all tons of money. And so, for someone like Bobby Kotick to have that promise and then for it to fall apart and not be managed well I think felt like a big blow, and a big shattering of trust. It’s like, “Hey, what’s going on? We need to get some adults in the room over here.” I think part of Blizzard’s charm, the reason they were able to thrive for so long is because no matter what their corporate parent was, and they went through a lot of corporate parents, Mike Morheim and his team were able to say, “Look, if you leave us alone, and let us slip a few times we will deliver hits.”, and for a long time that was true. It was just non-stop hits, culminating in World of Warcraft, which is the biggest hit of all, possibly the most lucrative game ever. Certainly, one of them. I think that’s when that changes, when you can’t say, “Leave us alone and we’ll make you hits”. I think that’s what triggered Bobby Kotick and his crew to want to make changes. So, no, I don’t think he wanted to make changes just for the sake of making changes.
MW: Blizzard is a big company with a storied history. Did you ever suffer from your own version of scope creep with this book in terms of the things that you were trying to cover?
Schreier: Yeah, the first draft I wrote is much, much bigger than this one. There’s a lot you could get into, and you could really get bogged down in the details when talking about 33 years of company history. Countless mega franchises and games and many, many thousands of people, each with their own stories. So a book that was trying to be the definitive Blizzard book could be millions of words long, but nobody would want to read that. I definitely had to have some discipline. And I was fortunate enough to have a fantastic editor and my book publisher who helped me make cuts and kill my darlings and make sure that only the absolute essential storytelling was left in this thing. That’s kind of inevitable with a project like this. You wind up with a lot more material than you actually use.
MW: Is there any chance of putting out excerpts or anything like that, or is this all we’re going to get?
Schreier: Maybe. I don’t think that there’s some incredible story that I didn’t wind up including the book that I could put somewhere else. Because for the most part what I cut from the book is more granular stuff, development details that maybe like harcore fans might find interesting, but not everybody is going to want to read.
MW: Maybe for the director’s cut.
Schreier: Yeah, right. The paperback version.
MW: Do you think it’s possible for a company to grow as large as Blizzard and not lose some of the more positive aspects of its cultural foundation?
Schreier: What you just asked is the thesis statement of the entire book, I think. I don’t know. My gut says no.
MW: I think I agree with that. When something balloons and size and the people who were responsible for implementing the culture, they can’t have eyes everywhere, all the time, right?
Schreier: Yeah, you lose something when you get to the point, I think, as a company where not everybody can be in the same room. I think things change a little bit for you if you’re the founder of a company or the CEO of a company if you don’t know everybody’s names, that’s a different environment than it is at a company where you know every single person who works for you. I think that can be good and bad, but it certainly changes you. And there’s no way to avoid that.
MW: And all the time you’ve been writing about the games industry and for as long as I’ve followed your reporting, it seems like you’re telling different versions of the same story. What do you think it’s going to take for a radical change in the way games are made and how the people who make them are treated?
Schreier: I don’t know. If I had the answer to that I would be a consultant making millions of dollars.
MW: I was curious because you’ve made a career out of talking to developers and reporting on inside the industry and the inner machinations of these places. Do you think the AAA system is just inherently broken? Because it seems they’re only getting more expensive, they get bigger, and more of them launch and fail. Look at something like Concorde that millions of dollars went into and it wasn’t even given two weeks before it was yanked off of the storefront, and that work, it’s just gone now. Maybe forever. Do you feel like we’re getting close to a tipping point where maybe these companies try to rethink the way that they monetize these games and try to make it more predictable? Because it seems like whatever they’re trying now isn’t working for a lot of people.
Schreier: It’s interesting. I think looking at this book, it’ll be really interesting to see what people think because there are a lot of games that are documented in this book and each of them has its own unique story and its own unique challenges that it went through. Some certainly healthier and less protracted than others. But even looking back when the really beloved core Blizzard games were made like Diablo, Diablo II, WarCraft, StarCraft. Those games are the product of 90s crunch for a lot of people, and that was brutal. And I think the crunch has gotten better, but the problems have emerged in other ways. Nowadays you have other issues. While at Blizzard there were issues of sexual discrimination and misconduct as well, depending on the team you were on, depending on the department you were in. Other issues have emerged since that crazy 90s crunch era.You have bigger team sizes which create other logistical challenges. The challenges, they’ve all changed, but they’re still there.
MW: It’s still a miracle that any game exists.
Schreier: Yeah, it really is. And it’s not like I’m not trying to be elusive and be like, “Ah, I know the answer, but I’m not giving it to you.”
MW: Dammit, Schreier!
Schreier: Yeah, right. I’m hiding it from you. Hiding the big secret. My panacea for the industry’s woes. I’m keeping it away from you. No, I really don’t know. It’s not something that I am really in a position to answer. Because I tell stories and talk to people and report on things. I don’t really propose solutions that often. Occasionally, I’ll talk about unionization. Press Reset, my last book, had some proposed solutions to some of the issues that were covered in that book. But it’s not like I think unionization is suddenly going to solve everybody’s problems. So, no, I don’t really have an answer and I feel like it’s much more to shed a light on problems and tell stories and inform and hopefully entertain people as well more so than to “fix” the video game industry.
MW: Don’t you ever get tired of being such a bummer?
Schreier: You think this book is a bummer?
MW: The book is great. I’m referring more to some of your reporting at large. It seems like whenever something bad happens in the industry it’s, “Oh, Jason Screier broke this over at Bloomberg.”
Schreier: No, I mean, I think anyone who follows my weekly newsletter at Bloomberg sees a pretty healthy mix of positive and negative industry stories, I would say.
MW: I just had to razz you a little bit.
Schreier: That’s OK. I think it’s a fair question.
MW: And finally, like I said, I’ve been following you for a long time and remember when you tweeted that you were going to be teaching your daughter to play Bloodborne. So I was wondering if she’s platinumed it yet.
Schreier: She has not, but that’s because Sony won’t remaster it.
MW: I was going to ask if she was waiting for the remaster.
Schreier: The thing about my daughter, she’s about to turn five, and she’s a bit of a frame rate snob. I showed her Bloodborne at two, two and a half and she was like, “Daddy, I can’t play this unless it’s 60 frames a second. Like what is this? Why would you expect me to play this choppy game with such terrible performance?” And I was like, “Look, I get it, sweetie.”
MW: You’re raising a frame snob.
Schreier: Right. And so she started a Reddit account, and she’s been just posting constantly on every single r/games post. She’s just been posting, “Bloodborne remaster when?”, and just waiting for the day to come, and then maybe she’ll be able to platinum it.
MW: Is there anything else you’d like to plug here at the end of our chat?
Schreier: Well, people can listen to the audiobook of Play Nice as they’re playing games such as World of Warcraft. We’re releasing an audio book on the same day as the hardcover and digital. Read by Ray Chase, the voice of Noctis from Final Fantasy XV. Everyone should also go listen to Triple Click, Triple Click rules.
