author: Bart Swiatek
Blizzard's Ex-CEO: We Cancel 50% of Games we Start Working on
Mike Morhaime, former CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, revealed at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona that his former company is cancelling half of the projects they team is starting to create. The reasons why productions are abandoned are sometimes very different.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- Blizzard Entertainment cancels half of the games it's starting to work on;
- The reasons for abandoning projects are different - sometimes it is about excessive ambition (e.g. in the well-known case of the MMO Titan), sometimes it is about weak market potential.
Mike Morhaime, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, spoke at the ongoing Gamelab conference in Barcelona (June 26-28 ). He resigned from the position of the company's CEO and retired last year. One of the topics discussed during the lecture was cancelled projects. According to Eurogamer, Diablo developers abandon approximately 50% of the games they are starting to work on.
"I've gone back every few years and checked the math on that, and it's pretty consistent," Morhaime said. "It's like half the titles we work on never make it."
What were those titles? We know about two productions from the StarCraft universe (a first-person shooter and an action game StarCraft: Ghost), first idea for Diablo 4, the adventure game Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans and the ambitious MMO Titan. The topic of the last game appeared during the aforementioned lecture - Mike Morhaime explained why the studio decided to cancel the project.
"We failed to control scope," Morhaime said. "It was very ambitious. It was a brand new universe, and it was going to be the next generation MMO that did all sorts of different things, it had different modes. We were sort of building two games in parallel, and it really struggled to come together." -There's a saying that 'perfect is the enemy of great', because if you strive for perfection you'll never ship. But I do think that there's so much competition out there," the developer added.
Mike Morhaime's words are reflected in the facts. Since 2015, Blizzard Entertainment has released only two new productions - Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. Although there are two big expansion to World of Warcraft, Legion and Battle for Azeroth, even if we take them into account, the company releases an average of one production per year. In the case of such a large corporation, which has numerous development teams under its wings, this is not a staggering pace.