as revealed in his new book, Play Nice: The Rise And Fall Of Blizzard Entertainment, […] he could tell when things were starting to fall apart, and a key reason for that was certain “business-minded hires,” including former CEO Bobby Kotick, who came on after the Activision merger.

MBA and MBA-minded parasites ruined shit for everyone? What a shocking revelation!

I knew it was going to be Kotick before I even clicked.

I'll never how these people don't know they're the bad guys, and how they just accept it if they do. Like, they only make things worse, they've never once added to the world.

I worked there during this time, and this pretty much confirms what everyone feared when the merger was announced. Part of me wants to read this book, but I know it will make me really mad.

Just a little anecdote, we had a meeting shortly after where Frank Pierce told us that major changes would basically happen over Morhaime's dead body. So when he left (and Pierce also) it was clear that it was over.

When something you love gets slowly corrupted.

I wonder if those "corruption" cliches in Blizzard game storytelling throughout the Kotick regime were a sort of subtle cry for help, the way Origin's developers cried for help during Ultima VII with EA-logo evil magic devices and the like and the massive dunking on Richard "Lord British" Garriot in the Serpent Isle expansion after he fucked them over and sold them out and had a cynically celebratory bonfire party where all their hard work on a Privateer sequel and other projects was set ablaze because he was cashing out.

I still remember when one of the founding developers of the Diablo series quit after too much corporate skullduggery and went somewhere else to make Torchlight instead.

The corpos he left behind, failsons and businessbros that they were, left a Twitter message regarding that founder's departure:

"FUCK THAT LOSER."

That's what pieces of shit were left in Blizzard ever after.