A Scrapped Overwatch Netflix Show, A Proposed Call Of Duty RTS, And Four More Details From An Upcoming Book On Blizzard

Activision Blizzard has been the subject of immense attention and scrutiny over the past three years, ever since the company was sued over an alleged culture of workplace harassment in 2021. This was followed by a $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft and over 2000 layoffs at the company. With all these big, far-reaching changes making headlines, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of all the other happenings within the company and its many individual teams. Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment is an upcoming book from Bloomberg (and ex-Kotaku) reporter Jason Schreier, and it’s going to blow the lid off several untold stories from the Warcraft and Overwatch developer. But we already know some of what’s in store, because in the lead-up to the book’s October 8 release, Schreier held a Reddit AMA in which he answered some big and small questions about the state of Blizzard.

Throughout the AMA, Schreier teased some stories that will be in the book itself (including the trials and tribulations of developing Overwatch 2, which has not lived up to the original 2019 pitch), and also replied to some big questions with answers that will be interesting, and in some cases likely very frustrating, to longtime Blizzard fans. We’ve rounded up a few of the big takeaways here.

Overwatch was notorious for its content drought in the years leading up to Overwatch 2’s launch in 2022. This was due to much of the team working on the sequel, but according to Schreier, Bobby Kotick, the ex-CEO who left the company in 2023, wanted to hire hundreds of people to lighten the load. Then-lead director Jeff Kaplan and producer Chacko Sonny were against this, which led to further complications in developing both games. Schreier’s full answer reads as follows:

“Yes - this is covered extensively in the book, but here’s the short version. Overwatch 1 was a huge success, and Bobby Kotick was thrilled about it. So thrilled, in fact, that he asked the board of directors to give Mike Morhaime a standing ovation during one meeting.

But following OW1's release, Team 4 began to run into a bit of a problem: they had too much work to do. They had to simultaneously: 1) keep making new stuff for OW1, which almost accidentally turned into a live-service game; 2) work on OW2, which was Jeff Kaplan’s baby and would have brought more players into the universe via PVE; and 3) help out with the ever-growing Overwatch League.

Kotick’s solution to this problem was to suggest that Team 4 hire more people. Hundreds more people, like his Call of Duty factory. And start a second team to work on OW2 while the old team works on OW1 (or vice versa). Kaplan and Chacko Sonny were resistant to this, because they believed pretty strongly in the culture they’d built (more people can sometimes lead to more problems and less efficient development), and it led to all sorts of problems as the years went on.”

When one Redditor asked if Blizzard had been working on a possible fourth Warcraft real-time strategy game, Schreier revealed that he’d been told production director Tim Morten attempted to get a new RTS out the door. However, Blizzard’s executive team didn’t seem gung-ho about going back to the RTS genre. Morten led pitches and prototypes, one of which was Warcraft 4. More surprising was that he also tried to pitch a Call of Duty RTS somewhere in the process. When Warcraft III: Reforged launched in 2020 and was considered a “blemish” on the company’s legacy, hopes for a new Warcraft RTS under Blizzard faded.

“So, okay. StarCraft II did pretty well but it didn’t meet the company’s lofty expectations, and each entry in the trilogy did worse than the last. Production director Tim Morten led a plan to release new content packs in the form of Nova Covert Ops (which I thought ruled) but that didn’t sell gangbusters either. Then SC2 went free to play and again did well, but not Overwatch or Hearthstone well.

Morten and his team tried for years to kick off a new RTS, making all sorts of pitches and prototypes, from Warcraft 4 to even, wildly, a Call of Duty RTS pitch. (He was desperate.) But there was no appetite among Blizzard’s executive team for a new RTS game. They held out hope that if WC3 Reforged was a massive success it might help open the doors for a WC4, but Reforged turned out to be a debacle — the company’s first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard’s history.

So in 2020, Morten and some of his team left to form Frost Giant (and recently released Stormgate).

Maybe under Xbox there’s room for a small team to work on an RTS and release it on Game Pass or something, but these days, who knows.”

Asked about whether the surge in micotransactions and the like was a direct result of Activision’s influence, Schreier says no, some of the earlier examples of microtransactions, such as the 2010 Celestial Steed mount in World of Warcraft, were introduced as ways for Blizzard to attempt to offset the cost of running servers and expanding the company, rather than any new push from Activision. It wasn’t until the 2013 cancellation of Titan, the game that would eventually lead to Overwatch, that pressures from Activision to introduce more microtransactions became more prevalent. The sad side note of Schreier’s answer here is that Diablo III only got one expansion because it no longer had any form of in-game revenue after the Auction House was removed, which led the team to devote resources to Diablo IV instead.

“This is a great question. And, as far as I know, the answer is no: it was Blizzard, not Activision.

To put things in context a little bit: 2009-2010 was an interesting time for Blizzard. World of Warcraft was firing on all cylinders and growing every year, but their other projects weren’t quite as successful. StarCraft II had to slip a year because the new Battle.net wasn’t ready, while Diablo III had gone through multiple reboots (and Blizzard North’s collapse) and was still years away. People were still jazzed about Titan, but... we all know how that one went.

But server costs were high, and the company was growing more and more every year. So Mike Morhaime started pushing all of the teams to include some sort of in-game monetization. WoW had cosmetics, SC2 would have a custom map marketplace, and Diablo III would have the auction house. (Fun fact: one of the reasons Diablo III never got a second expansion was because after removing the auction house, it no longer had a source of recurring revenue, and so Bliz decided to move straight to D4 rather than trying to make new content for it.)

The merger undoubtedly came with new pressures, because now rather than just being a small part of Vivendi, Blizzard was one of the two names in the title of a publicly traded company, and I’m sure that had an impact on Morhaime’s decision-making. But this push for in-game revenue did not, as far as I know, come from Activision or Kotick.

The pressures from Activision really started in 2013, after Titan was canceled, and trickled all the way down to the entirety of the company around 2017-2018.”