Play Nice

Play Nice backs two of Tom's lessons. Under each of his lessons, what the book says about it, and on which pages.

• Move the people you have before you hire

  Blizzard promoted testers and customer service staff into artist and quest designer roles through a map editor test instead of hiring outsiders. pp. 88, 91 and 92. In the book: Management by chaos, Donut theory, Guided museum quest design, Promote testers by test, Reboot decision.

• A brand that compounds has a mission and an enemy

  Blizzard's player first mission, its free Battle.net and its habit of beating a named rival like EverQuest built brand equity that outlasted any single launch. pp. 57, 83 and 208. In the book: Management by chaos, Donut theory, Guided museum quest design, Promote testers by test, Reboot decision, Overwatch rescue pitch, Overwatch League franchise pricing, Franchise general manager structure, Blizzard's five new values.

Schreier argues that Blizzard rose because a small group of players made polished games, shipped them when ready, and were shielded from a string of corporate owners by founders who promised hits in return for autonomy. World of Warcraft then turned a product studio into a company of thousands whose money attracted Activision, whose chief Bobby Kotick prized predictability, annual franchises and finance led control. Over the decade after 2013 the player first culture lost out to quotas, monetisation targets, stack ranking and pay below market, while the Titan failure removed the trust that had protected autonomy. A long record of crunch, a boys' club and weak HR then surfaced in the 2021 California lawsuit, which cost Kotick's lieutenants their jobs and helped drive the sale to Microsoft. The book closes on a company still making acclaimed games but with its founders gone, 1,900 more staff laid off and its identity unsettled.

• Adham's donut theory: aim at the hardcore hole for evangelism and the midcore ring for volume, with games easy to learn and difficult to master (p. 31 to p. 32).
• Cancelling around half of projects, and missing Christmas 1996 with Diablo, protected the brand and still produced a hit (p. 43, p. 45).
• Making Battle.net free bought brand equity with players over short term income (p. 57).
• Hearthstone shows a tiny team told to stay small, plus a forced detour, can beat a large funded effort (p. 155 to p. 157).
• Annualising Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero raised revenue while the creative capacity of each franchise fell (p. 184).
• Overwatch worked because the team could say no and had a clear vision and short timeline, unlike Titan's open cheque (p. 190, p. 173).
• The player sentiment bank account: leaving money on the table to protect trust, and what discounting does to value (p. 208, p. 210).
• Stack ranking and metric inflation erode creative cultures, and underpaid support staff leave for double pay (p. 254 to p. 257).
• Teams accept cancellations when treated like adults, as the Ares case shows (p. 236).
• The Overwatch League failed because the model served the publisher, the game was hard to watch and the pandemic removed live events (p. 216 to p. 218, p. 285 to p. 287).

• What makes a format repeatable, as opposed to a hit that happened once?

  Blizzard repeated the Warcraft template in StarCraft and Diablo, but annualised franchises like Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero declined as sequels shipped every year, so the repeatable part is a polished format with room to iterate (p. 184).

• How do you build a personal brand that generates inbound rather than requiring outbound?

  Jeff Kaplan's video updates and Ben Brode's laughing public presence turned developers into faces that pulled players in without paid reach (p. 192, p. 159).

• Which of my stories travel, and which only feel like they should?

  The staged Leeroy Jenkins video and the Overwatch animated shorts both spread widely because they carried character and a clear emotional story, not because they were promotions (p. 107, p. 193).

• What is the smallest team that can produce at the volume I am used to?

  Hearthstone was capped at fifteen developers and Overwatch resisted growing past about 150, while Titan and Call of Duty style headcounts slowed delivery (p. 155, p. 218, p. 172).

Tom builds and runs content teams inside creator and founder businesses, as a fractional Head of Content. Fractional Head of Content, UK