Blizzard cofounder launches new gaming endeavor Dreamhaven
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Morhaime has now left the company he helped found, and one he sold off eons ago. Now stepping into a new vessel he gets to sell a bit less equity this time around and bring along the cream of his leadership team. No doubt he funded the initial paperwork out of his own pocket, but soon accepted one of the flood of investment offers.
It is an old play book yet no one talks about it when the play succeeds. Remember that falling out Martin O'Donnell had with Bungie? Did you notice how Martin moved on to found his own studio, one which successfully shipped a non-trivial game? Now not only does he get all the creative control he wanted, but even all of the financial upside.
Video games are so successful even those people getting pushed out of the "golden castle" have the skills and connections to build their own castle. No doubt this would change if games were not such a quick growing industry, but we've maintained that growth for a couple decades now.
This I think leads back to a fan favorite topic: unionization in games. For the opposite reason one might think: those successful enough to be "too important too lose" for studios are more likely setup new studios before they ever spend their political capital on unionization. This leaves the suits, who by definition are incapable of setting a studio, and the "bulk of the creative team".
Hollywood could unionize because no matter how famous no star alone is capable of walking out the door to make a new studio. Thus the stars and more importantly directors saw the studios as overlords, not future peers. Games does not have that, and it is a core problem the games unionization movement needs to figure out a solution to.
That's why Hollywood unionized the way it did. A specific studio couldn't unionize because they would just get dissolved and reformed under a new LLC.
No actor or famous game designer is capable of creating a AAA movie/game by themselves. They need a lot of people to work on it.
The only difference is Hollywood the entire pool of workers unionized they have no choice but to hire a union worker.
Game designers/programmers need to follow the same formula. The two industries have exactly the same problem, Hollywood workers have been around long enough to figure out the solution.
Also of note, the various film industry unions were largely created back in the day when unionization was generally more popular in society. They have remained strong - like steelworkers - because the protections are worth joining, apprenticeship and training is available/valuable, and the working conditions are often potentially hazardous. People Don’t realize, but industry workers get injured/die every year on movie sets (though it is better than it used to be).
Is this largely due to construction projects like sets and the use of heavy equipment, or is it more from stunts or something else I haven't considered?
Also, since you're an insider, when they build sets and props and stuff, do they still have to follow OSHA requirements and get safety inspections and stuff?
Q2: I don’t know. I imagine it depends on how much is being built and how controlled the environment would be.
Edit: I should also stress the impact of sleep deprivation on accidents and mistakes. Filmmaking hours are often pegged at 12+ as a standard day, and a well financed production won’t bat an eye at paying the penalties to push a crew.
I was/am on the same committe (SOC)
Deaths and permanent injury were actually horrifyingly common from what I know of very early film industry. Unionisation, at least of stuntmen, has probably saved a couple of hundred lives, both literally and in avoiding permanent injury.
Simple exhaustion can do it. There was a famous case about a woman who got hit by some kind of railcar being used in production a few years ago. She died. There was a documentary made about it called “who needs sleep”. Conditions can be really really difficult sometimes, because a stars time Immensely valuable, while crew time is cheaper. So a star is ie 10k p hour While keeping crew around awake for 12/16 hours a day to shoot when they’re finished makeup / shooting another scene somewhere else is often more economical to keep the crew awake for too long. You have to finish “the day” since the star is payed per diem, afaik. I don’t work in Hollywood but film and commercials.
I've done the OSHA 40 hour training and even had a reportable OSHA incident (minor cut finger on a soil density gauge that got infected and required antibotics), I never heard from the agency.
Do you think they would join if they weren't forced to join? If so why should they be forced to join? This kind of arrangement is illegal in Europe so it isn't required to get high union participation.
I’m going to be a bit handwavy here:
generally - crew members do not work for a specific company, so the problem of a “Union only” job is perhaps somewhat different. Crew members are all functionally contractors for that one specific production. There are no long term contractual obligations. After that production is over, they have to hunt around for their next gig which reinforces the relationship based job economy of Hollywood labor.
When a production is kicking, off department heads will be hired (for instance, a Director is Photography) and they will hire the crew members below them in the hierarchy. Many department heads will have their regular group of people they call, and it can be difficult to break into the network. Most people who join a union have experience, training, references, etc which help build those connections.
Again, non-union film production happens all the time. The benefits of joining one of the unions are positive enough that most people do, but You don’t have to be in Local 600 to shoot a movie.
This is only required in some cases. In a “union shoot” as it were. These are rare in comparison to non-union films. Every actor has many examples of non-union films they participate in.
Usually big stars work in non-union roles and films to give younger professionals an opportunity. The star provides marketing power for a smaller Non-union production. Then people can join the union as well.
Actors aren't allowed to participate in non-union films. They sometimes do anyway but the contract says they can't.
> SAG-AFTRA members cannot accept an acting role in any studio, independent, low-budget, pilot, experimental, non-profit, interactive, educational, student, or ANY production, unless that producer has signed a Contract or Letter of Agreement with SAG-AFTRA.
> Members who are found in violation of these rules are subject to serious fines and discipline by a panel of union peers.
https://www.sagaftra.org/what-happens-if-i-accept-non-union-...
To your question, I was a member of IATSE Local 600 (Cinematographer’s Guild) as a loader, 2nd AC, digital utility and sometimes focus puller. I noted my union affiliation upthread. Members are explicitly allowed to work on non-union jobs, but there is an expectation that you call it in if the budget is over ~1 million. Below that, the union is not particularly interested in attempting to flip the show so no one cares.
(This is where I would call you out for your tone of ignorant self superiority, but I’ll just defer to the HN guidelines and let it drop)
(Not claiming that the conclusions drawn by the GP or GGP are incorrect here - I don't know much about the games industry. Just talking about HN more generally.)
no need to generalize an entire gender, especially since that has no relevance to this discussion
> The "vast majority" of people commenting, sharing and liking anti-vaccination information on Facebook are women, a new study finds.
https://www.livescience.com/61305-most-online-anti-vaxxers-a...
If your workers are members of a union... how does closing the company and starting a new one help? They're still in the union.
The CWA is/has tried recruiting in tech
> The CWA is/has tried recruiting in tech
I don't see a way for individuals to join, just how to get them to help you organize a company union.
https://cwa-union.org/join-union
Compare to Swedens engineering union which you just have to fill in this form for and then you are a member:
In USA (I dunno where you are from), sometimes the union is company-specific, as in: the union forms inside the company and has only that company workers and has some say on the company management.
In Holywood that didn't work, because movies often have a one-off company created just for them (it still works this way).
So the actors and whatnot created non-company unions, so this way they get what you just said (ie: company dissolves, but employees are still in a union, since the union wasn't tied to a company).
Thats basically impossible though. Because, at some point, programmers from other industries, will just enter the market.
What, are you going to try and unionize the entire tech industry? Because I'm not going to go along with that (I will defect, every step of the way, if people try to push me into that arrangement).
And if you don't unionize all of tech, then programmers from outside the industry will be able to compete for those jobs.
I don't think game developers need to be paid more than somebody working in the supermarket or digging a trench.
I don't think that's quite true: United Artists was founded specifically by stars that walked out of the door, hence its name.
And today lots of stars have their own production companies, and the studio simply acts as the distributor. They handle getting the movie into cinemas, but otherwise don't have a financial stake.
Some examples that come to mind:
* Will Ferrell: Gary Sanchez Productions * Tom Cruise: Cruise/Wagner * Adam Sandler: Happy Madison * Brad Pitt: Plan B * Shonda Rhimes: Shondaland
Both Shondaland and Happy Madison aren't beholden to regular studios at all, they simply have multi-picture deals with the highest bidder (in both cases, Netflix).
Examples: United Artists was started in 1919 by W.D. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Or Mercury Theater, founded by Orson Wells and Houseman. Dreamworks, founded by Spielberg (and Katzenberg and Geffen). And there are dozens of production companies owned by actors and directors. Many of these firms eventually get acquired by major studios.
While it may be easier to find success with an indie game than an indie film, I don't see why one is easier than the other assuming the team has the appropriate skillset. The parallels between film making and game making are quite substantial, IMO. Both the business and process.
And then in terms of reputation, very few people in games - usually designers - are household names. I'm talking maybe a dozen or two people in the entire industry (vs hundreds in film). And I would assume that it's very hard to get outside investment without that star power.
Finally, games is an enormously crowded space. Thanks in part to the massive influx of indies, improvement in tools, etc there's an insane amount of oversaturation on platforms like Steam. This means that thousands of high-quality games go completely unnoticed and die a quiet death. Unless you have that star power to get people paying attention in the first place, or you win the social media lottery and go viral, you're probably toast.
So yes, the market is huge and growing, but despite that it remains a really brutal industry to be in. Big studios know this, and they take full advantage of it, knowing that their employees would likely have it even worse if they left.
If everyone adopts the same game engines and assets become cheap and easy to produce, could there be a renaissance of small gaming studios that are sustainable and pay competitive wages?
What's the blocker? Why aren't things better?
Even star power isn't enough persay
https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2020/09/17/disintegrati...
Games can take thousands of people to make, from coding to marketing. Maybe one or two will be able to start a new company with any success. I do really like John Romero's smaller projects though.
Not everything needs to be a AAA game
How come with all this data collection and targeted advertisement, I never saw an ad for this? Google and Facebook should know that I'm interested in a Halo-like new game.
I don't think the premise upthread - that there are zillions of high quality games that nobody notices is really true. Yes, it's a crowded market but it's also absolutely mobbed with people looking for the next big or interesting thing - to play, to stream, to make a catchy review of, etc.
And as a whole the industry remains stuck on the problem of how to run the production, since it's still challenging to ship anything even now.
Tech companies have tried this in the past, now this would typically be met with an antitrust suit rather than creating a guild. Not sure which is preferable.
With a guild/union: grievances are addressed immediately or before they occur (depending on the structure of work contracts), minimizing the economic suffering to employees.
Generally, from the perspective of employees, guilds/unions are better.
EDIT: a "guild" is a union for independent contractors.
The list of reasons unionizing drivers would be difficult to impossible is long and obvious, but the outcome would surely be better than some hamfisted state law.
Also, right now uber is framing the issue as drivers vs the state. A union push would make it uber vs the drivers, much harder to spin.
The state could mandate sectoral representation for all the drivers, functionally requiring unionization. That way the nitty gritty details are still just contract negotiations between the union and the gig economy companies, but there isn't too much space for overly broad or stifling regulatory requirements (from the State anyway, between the lawyers on all sides of the issue is a different story).
In tech, it is this:
Stage 1: Graduate college and get hired by a growing company. Observe all you can about what works and what doesn't while networking with the best people. Ideally a public company so that you can participate in its growth through equity ownership (stock options, employee purchase plans, Etc.)
Stage 2: Found (or join as founder) startup composed of good engineers you know, that is funded by VC money. Build it up to an exit to get a bigger slice of the pie given your greater equity.
Stage 3: Found a new company where it is primarily funded by your founders and not VC. Build that company up to an exit and you and your friends collect the big bucks as you still own most of the equity.
At this point you're independently wealthy and can do what ever you want with your life[1]
It has been the "silicon valley dream" for a lot of people over the last 30 years. And since each stage is typically 4 - 6 years that is really a 15 to 20 year plan.
Doesn't work for everyone though, and I have observed that people who are on this trajectory and recognize they are unlikely to reach orbit (so to speak), can get pretty vicious. You have a relatively short window to decide if the current stage is going to meet your goals for that stage or not, and if a stage doesn't provide the necessary lift, you probably only get one additional shot at making it work. As a result this path also leads to a place of depression for some.
[1] Assuming along the way you've learned to manage your wealth in a sustainable fashion.
I’d say that there is an extremely small portion of people that are able to complete Stage 2. “Doesn’t work for everyone” seems like an understatement.
Stage 3 is probably easier to do once you completed stage 2, but still is very difficult.
Really, how many people can you count that would have successfully pulled this off? 100 maybe?
Of people I know who have stepped off at stage 2, they pocket enough wealth that they no longer have to work to maintain a moderate lifestyle, and then move to a place that interests them and work on other pursuits.
The latter is especially helpful for differentiating between people who talk a good game and actually know what they are talking about.
Practice not assuming anything about someone based on their appearances. Learn to listen uncritically so that you can hear the insights they bring to the table. I know some folks who are genius level smart and have a horrible time trying to express themselves. I've often suspected it was because they think about things so differently that it is hard for them to translate how they think about something into concepts "normal" people understand.
The best mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineers in the world work for big engineering firms (and make mega bucks).
We have a few relatively small contracting firms in software right now, but there is no reason why we could not have large Software Engineering firms that can handle entire design and engineering for any game studio far better and more efficiently than the studios could ever do themselves.
For example, if the top 1000 game designers and developers started their own firm, then I imagine every studio would be forced to use them at whatever price for competitive reasons.
Are you a VC? Invest in that. Insta-monopoly. Top talent (especially in bulk) is very much the most difficult thing to replicate in any market.
The people in these high profile roles that gather as "founding core members" often found themselves in the position of right-place-right-time and afterwards just tried to keep up with the changes, and so, to some extent, they end up branded as creative and business talents, when the thing being tested most often in their career was their ability to sufficiently manage and delegate to get the project over the finish line.
So every time I see a story of a AAA vet starting something new I think to myself "prepare for some hard knocks", cause they are now being retested on their scrappy start-up abilities, but often get burdened by the expectations of an established studio, and entrenched in a particular approach. They can raise a lot but very often it means they fail big, too.
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.
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.
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.
Most of Activision's portfolio is franchises with a set amount of change per iteration.
I can imagine this mismatch in style causing issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6oRuu9tLg
The short version is Blizzard is a shell of their former glory, and they are making decisions based on cash and appeasement of the Chinese govt. Most of you probably remember the Diablo: Immortal reception (Chinese mobile game presented as a keynote at the American, PC-playing blizzcon fan convention).
I deeply hope Morhaime is able to recapture the lightning in a bottle that existed at old Blizzard, and this doesn't end up as another Hellgate: London fiasco.
I recall HGL also had some unfortunate memory leak issues.
In general I think that game was largely hamstrung by performance issues for one reason or another.
The idea of a FPS Action RPG like that wa as simple as it was brilliant. I've wondered why it hadn't been done before and still hasn't quite been done again. Games like Dark Souls exist but I don't think they're quite the same. Rumor is Diablo IV was going to go there but Blizzard later changed their mind, rather opting for a traditional isometric view. I think they lose a lot of immersion doing that. Imagine sneaking through damp, dark cellars and have demons lurk around the corners, and everything built upon a solid itemization system and replayability with randomized maps.
Content aside - I feel like this video is terribly edited, scripted and produced. It's impossible to follow - thanks to all the shallow jokes, weird cuts and messy presentation. Almost like it's intentionally made for people without an attention span...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPFtUiTncy8
Seth Schiesel, an NYT vet and old school WoW player interviews Morhaime during April of this year.
Last year I had a Blizzard recruiter reach out to me. It was sad because when I got my CS degree in 2014, I had a dream of working for Blizzard. I told the recruiter that I had that dream, but after they decided to lay people off after reaching record profits, I no longer had any interest in working for them.
I ended up looking on Glassdoor for the position I would have worked and the pay was absolutely abysmal. Not sure how they would expect someone to live in or near Irvine, CA for $90K/year, or why anybody would accept that salary when other companies would pay nearly double that for the same work and experience.
Sounds like the typical expiration date for a non-compete, so I assume they've been planning to do this for some time.
Let's hope it works out. In this era of constant consolidation, I'm always happy to see new companies spring up.
I did a deal with my small company in 2008 where I sold IP. I personally agreed not to go and recreate that IP for at least 5 years, and for that, I would receive revenue share from the current IP.
I also did a deal with a different small company I created at the tail end of 2016 whereby I received a cash payout with an attached clause of being sued into oblivion should I a) attempt to work with the client in some capacity for a period of time or b) talk about client so as not to jeopardise the in-place contracts. The company that acquired my company was interested in the contracts that my company had with a client, not the IP so much.
Non-competes in California are very enforceable, but they usually come with money attached and are not used to bludgeon a Sandwich Artist from earning a living at the deli across the road.
The above is a fairly interesting flowchart detailing where all of the core employees moved on to after leaving Blizzard. Some have met success, most have folded.
To me, the only employee that ever mattered was Chris Metzen. He was the one who developed the core of all of their stories and personally approved every quest in WoW. If you're going to try to get players to emotionally connect to characters and story arcs, I would think that the writer would be the best place to figure out how.
And you'll see it repeated over and over on the reviews on the steam page.
Some people claim it gets better if you stick with it, and I did because I was playing it over a holiday. My experience was they're wrong, it never gets better.
Take EVE Online. I love the ideas of the game. There are no rules (As long as you're not hacking/cheating) to what players can do. You can scam people. You can kill noobs (Though if you're in high-security space, you'll be instagibbed by CONCORD, essentially the space police). And the fact that losing your ship means its GONE means there's always a demand for crafted goods. Skills are learned over time whether you're playing or not, so you don't need to grind.
But...the actual gameplay is boring as hell [0].
OTOH, I found the mechanics of the recent Spider-Man game kind of fun, but the macro game is just endless repetition. Which feels true of a lot of AAA games these days.
Me and my wife both cringed really hard to the repetitiveness and the blandness of the characters however. Tons of plot inconsistencies!
I was fairly attached to WoW while never paying much attention to the superficial stories and quests. I did at first, but it honestly wasn't great from what I remember (the first WoW), and so I just focused on the gameplay and team work rather than the story.
Personally, I read books for the story, and play games for the mechanics.
Overwatch is another example where you can see this battle unfold. There are now 2 completely separate competitive ranked queue options with different rule sets in order to bridge this gap in gameplay expectations. I personally prefer the unconstrained queue where more dynamic teamwork is required, but a lot of players prefer the role queue where they can expect certain meta styles. I think both are perfectly valid ways to play the game, and this approach might be a good example of ways we might be able to handle these varying expectations in a more general way.
Diablo 3's hardest difficulty at launch was a nightmare. You had to move around with Ninja Gaiden/Dark Souls-level precision in a game engine that just was _not_ designed to give you that much precise control
So often I'd be trying to run out of something, accidentally click a monster instead of a patch of open ground, and my guy would stop to turn around and shoot. It was horrible
Not only was it un-fun to play, it actively made me feel bad. "Hey, game's over, you're just not good enough to play any more Diablo. Get out."
This is the direction Path of Exile has gone and frankly it sucks. It more closely resembles bullet-hell games than old school Diablo 2.
Fun content, but anywhere past Act 2 was dramatically overtuned. Ultimately you don't want the only reasonable path to be cheese strats.
We see a lot of "core member of great thing founds own thing" and you really want to see them succeed but having an organization succeed takes a a lot of people with lots of different skills. I'm not convinced that any given jumble of highly talented folks actually produce something if we somehow ran a but of iterations of "jumble of highly talented folks".
I've heard plenty of stories of such folks going their own way to be stopped by basic business type problems like project management, just managing people, maintaining focus, raising money and keeping investors happy, etc.
The ones I just know of are also people friends say are both great at their stuff and good to work with, so I have high hopes they’ll make some awesome stuff.
We build all kinds of fun tools like that.
(https://perchance.org/reddit-username)
Its my go-to place when i need another 30-40 accounts.
Lots of subreddits have restrictions based on karma and account age. Mass creating in batches seemed the easiest answer.
* To players it sounds like a typical company stuido name. Quite nice
* To current and ex-blizzard staff it is a beacon call. "Come and dream again here"
* To Activision management it seems like a bit of an insult in that Blizzard was no longer a place where you could dream.
But maybe I am reading too much into it.
It lets you see him relaxing as a pretty chill guy. He really cares about creating good games
One of the insightful remarks he made was that StarCraft was easier to balance than WarCraft because it had so much more asymmetry
It was apparently Morhaime who gave us Diablo 3 fans the scraps of the cancelled second expansion as free content update as pure fan service. Without these and the concepts they introduced, Diablo 3 would have lacked major end game features essential for its longevity like Greater Rifts and Kanai's Cube. He truly understood the importance of gamer relations and from others it sounds like he has a big gaming heart.
If Dreamhaven creates successful, enjoyable games the answer will be clear.
There's also https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/09/23/mike-m....