Blizzard Co-founder Mike Morhaime believes that the gaming industry needs to give developers the proper environment in which to take risks and build new things.
Mike Morhaime gave his thoughts on the current position of indie developers, World of Warcraft and Blizzard itself in an interview with New York Time’s Seth Schiesel, as part of the GamesBeat Summit 2020.
Blizzard Co-founder Sees Developers Taking Risks As Important
“Our industry is full of dreamers that want to focus on creating great, awesome content and they’re not necessarily that interested in focusing on all the businesses side and logistical side of what it takes to actually fund and operate a big company – they just want to make great games. Now they have more avenues to do that than ever before.”, he told Seth Schiesel when discussing the various options new or smaller developers have in terms of publishing and distribution nowadays.
“[…] the industry kind of needs to evolve to give those folks a safe haven where they can, you know, focus on taking risks and doing things that haven’t been done before, and iterate in a safe way during development to come up with great things”, he continued.
During the same interview, he also names the increased level of accessibility to have played a role in World of Warcraft’s decline in popularity, as it hurt the game’s social aspect, which Morhaime thinks was one of the game’s core strengths.
Mike Morhaime left Blizzard in 2019 after resigning from his role of president one year prior.
