As an ex-Blizzard engineer (left last year shortly after the 2019 layoffs) this makes so much sense to me. I saw Mike a few weeks before he announced his resignation and it was so obvious to me that he was super sad about leaving. Rumors were rife at the time that he was being "forced out" by Activision and I think that ended up being the case.
Mike left Blizzard some months before the layoffs were announced and the general conclusion was that Mike was told by Bobby Kotick that he had to do the layoffs or leave Blizzard, and hence Mike ended up resigning.
His resignation email said all the same stuff like "Mike wanting to spend more time with family" etc etc. But now it's fairly clear that was all crap, he still wanted to run a games company, he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard.
>he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard.
I'm curious to hear some anecdotes about this. I've worked at an Activision studio and the central management mostly stayed out of the way. There were meetings and green lights and deadlines but it seemed pretty normal. We didn't see a lot of "corporate says X so change everything!" From my experience the studios have a lot of autonomy and Blizzard is even more in control of its own destiny.
Or it might be the case where your reporting lines were able to do their job and keep you away from all the upper-level politics? I also used to work on online game companies and thought that we were given lots of autonomy like you until I found our director and producer fiercely fighting back against all the pressures coming from corporate and sales guys in executive level meetings. Because of this experience, I wouldn't take those autonomy for granted; Mike probably also had done the same thing more than 10 years and given up for some reasons.
Yeah sometimes you don't realize just how good a job your boss is doing till they're gone. Then the dam breaks and all the shit starts flooding downhill.
Perhaps. I just find that every time I question the scapegoating of Activision with my own experience I never get any concrete details or first person experience.
Its just too much of a coincidence to me that at the same time they got acquired by a Bobby Kotick run company they started churning out games that, while not completely terrible, when compared to their older efforts were uninspired, generic trash made by money hungry assholes.
It never felt like something Blizzard would do, it felt like exactly what Activision would do. Maybe too many of the key people had left at that point. It happens to a lot of companies when they get big.
Blizzard's way of developing games isn't (or wasn't) the same as any other Activision studio. Blizzard was always "find the fun, take as long as you want, cancel a game if it's not top tier quality."
Most of Activision's portfolio is franchises with a set amount of change per iteration.
I can imagine this mismatch in style causing issues.
Fortunately, there's no longer such a mismatch in styles. Their last few projects (Hearthstone expansions, Warcraft III: Remastered, the last WoW expansion, and quite likely the upcoming one) are hot messes from a quality and fun standpoint.
How big was the studio compared to Blizzard? Blizzard is an Activision strategic asset, their name is on the door, etc. It stands to reason the relationship might be quite different compared even to something like 'important studio that does important releases of an important franchise'.
Mike left Blizzard some months before the layoffs were announced and the general conclusion was that Mike was told by Bobby Kotick that he had to do the layoffs or leave Blizzard, and hence Mike ended up resigning.
His resignation email said all the same stuff like "Mike wanting to spend more time with family" etc etc. But now it's fairly clear that was all crap, he still wanted to run a games company, he just wanted to be free from Activision and their general heavy handed management and manipulation of Blizzard.