Oh, She's Bookish: Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Play Nice, Book Cover Image

I don’t have decades of nostalgia built up for the largest MMO experience of all time. What I do have are thousands of hours in the greatest ARPG of all time and launch memories of the most polished Hero Shooter. Those memories are decades old and, like many of the interviewees in this book, I too felt the high highs and catastrophic lows of Blizzard over those years.

I never planned on reading this book. From the outside looking in, it felt like Blizzard’s downfall and repeated failure felt understandable. For myself, the most impactful moments were the release of Diablo III - the dreadful mixture of a decades worth of waiting and excitement followed by something worse than failure, a decidedly middling game - and the release of Overwatch, a profound and inspiring moment. I can’t understate what type of emotional reboot Overwatch had on me, and I think many other people. Its polish and sheer amount of fun in a brand new franchise felt impossible, and yet Blizzard still had magic. Yet, Blizzard eventually returned to the backburner of my mind and heart. A Diablo sequel I felt little excitement or hope for and Overwatch was quickly becoming embroiled in opaque sequal rumors and was quickly declining in gameplay quality, and the initial high of the Overwatch League - in which I attended the team launch event in Washington, DC - was rapidly heading for failure. This was all in the shadow of the infamous Blizzard walkout and the name Bobby Kotick being emblazoned onto my brain. The Xbox acquisition felt like the nail in the coffin. Over this time, I became desensitized to Blizzard’s magic and immune to their words. Diablo IV was also middling, but having steeled my emotions with Diablo III, I was able to enjoy it as is. It was a good game, but in the pantheon of Blizzard games before it, it felt small and antiquated.

This book changed much of how I see Blizzard, and how my feelings and beliefs about a publisher who has had undue influence on my life.

More than anything, this book helped me compartmentalize where the blame lies in the three-decade history of Blizzard, of which I have been playing their games for over twenty years. The deep, investigative reporting neatly tracks and delineates creative miracles from blustering business decisions. The opening few chapters are full of charisma and late 90s/early 00s classic Dot Com era stories of college students and dropouts alike building billion-dollar franchises from humble and exceptionally problematic beginnings.

Those years, with all their flaws, are excellent storytelling and one trend throughout the book that never failed to make me smile was the number of folks that flowed in and out of Blizzard that would go on to create legendary studios of their own, or other creative ventures that became household names.

While I tore through this book in just a few days, it only got more painful to read as the story progressed. The journalistic writing style, which I liken to a bridge - serviceable and measured, but lacking in flavor or style, is a merciful feature as I witnessed the decisions that directly caused everything I had felt and witnessed. While stories of development are certainly new, it is the history of publicly traded conglomerates relationship to Blizzard which was completely obfuscated to me. I didn’t realized Activision and Blizzard were united years earlier than the Xbox acquisition and that much of the business strategy that hemorrhaged the company and ironed out Blizzard’s development ethos were years, and sometimes decades, in the making.

As the book - and time - progresses, less franchises are being made, sequels are delayed, internal projects are canceled, layoffs become more common, and the quality of all suffer. What I assumed was a studio and publisher resting on its laurels or dealing with sophomore album syndrome, all of which were exacerbated by a game that simply couldn’t infinitely grow, was really a story a steady, incremental project to slowly dismantle Blizzard piece-by-piece. This book covers how each of these small and large moments steadily added up over decades to result in reality.

Overall, I am very happy I read this book. I love Blizzard Entertainment. Seeing their logo and recalling countless memories, even of my limited WoW experience of replaying the free 1-20 trial over and over again, still make me smile and can even cause me to tear up. What is resounding through this book is that through thick and thin these games had a disproportionate impact on those of us who played and loved them. I’m not exactly sure how this book changes my relationship with Blizzard, but I know it has. It’s worth reading if Blizzard has affected you in any meaningful way. We all have feelings about Blizzard and I think this book helps shake up those feelings.

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Oh, She's Bookish: Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment

Play Nice, Book Cover Image