At the beginning of 2021, just a few months before the release of my last book, I started thinking about former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. (As one does.) For years I had been hearing that Activision was taking a larger role in operations at Blizzard Entertainment, one of the biggest hitmakers in the video game industry. What I didn’t know was why. What made Kotick feel the need to step in? Why was this beloved company, once considered the Pixar of video games, now infested by finance bros and MBAs? And was the story really that simple?

Nearly four years, 350 interviews, and one $69 billion acquisition later, the answers to those questions have arrived in Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, which is out today in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. Unsurprisingly, the narrative is more nuanced and complex than it ever appeared from the outside.

Play Nice chronicles 33 years of Blizzard history. It starts off in the 1990s, before Blizzard was even called Blizzard, and details how a small group of artists and engineers created sensations like Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. The company grew slowly and steadily until 2004, when it released World of Warcraft, one of the most lucrative games of all time. Blizzard transformed into an empire, with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue.

Then the problems started. The Activision takeover. PR disasters, including an international incident that somehow got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez teaming up with Ted Cruz. A sexual misconduct lawsuit. An acquisition by Xbox. And mass layoffs.

This is a book about the tension between creativity and the never-ending pursuit of growth. It’s a book about board-room battles, boys club culture, and how money and power can change people. It’s a book about the creative process and a lot of people trying to do their best under impossible situations. It’s a book about one of the most remarkable companies in business history. And it’s a book about a guy named Leeroy Jenkins.

Still on the fence? You can read excerpts about the Blizzard vs. Activision battle and the collapse of Titan. I wrote broadly about Blizzard’s growth problem on The Atlantic and I broken down the secrets behind its success on Bloomberg. And here’s an audio excerpt of the first chapter. You can also find me on just about every major gaming podcast talking about the book (including my own).

I hope you enjoy reading Play Nice as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If you follow any authors on social media, listen to them talk on podcasts, or subscribe to their newsletters (ahem), you have probably seen a familiar call to action: “pre-order now!” Which might seem strange. Books are not limited-edition commodities, like custom sneakers or Zelda-themed consoles. You probably won’t have a hard time finding the latest Stephen King at your local Barnes & Noble.

But pre-orders can have a significant impact on authors, which is why we do things like, say, offer a signed copy and 30% discount to anyone who pre-orders PLAY NICE: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment from Porchlight Books by September 24.

This is because pre-orders…

• …help bookstores know how many copies of a book to buy. Dozens of new books come out every week, and no store on the planet has the space (or budget) to get them all. Pre-ordering helps indie stores, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon know how many print copies to order, where to shelf them, and how much attention to give each one.

• …contribute to week-one sales, which helps a book get on bestseller lists. It’s a funny thing — “bestseller” status is determined by the number of sales in one specific week rather than its lifetime. That means a book that sells 100,000 copies at a clip of 1,000 per week for two years might never be a bestseller, but a book that sells only 5,000 copies in a single week will be. Still, as silly as the math can be, these lists are important, and pre-orders help make it possible to get on them.

• …signal to the publisher that people will actually buy the book. This helps them justify spending more money on marketing, sales, store placement, and all the rest of the little things that go into making a book successful.

I am very proud of PLAY NICE and I am very excited for it to (finally!) be in people’s hands. It tells a wild, unbelievable, true story about one of the most fascinating companies in video game history. If that sounds interesting to you, I hope you pre-order it and help make it successful enough that I can keep writing more books in the future.

We’re just about three weeks away — more to come very soon!

We’re two months away from the release of my next book, PLAY NICE: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Entertainment. This is the calm before the storm — the few remaining quiet weeks before the whirlwind of interviews, excerpts, reviews, Reddit AMAs, podcasts, and me trying to figure out how to use TikTok.

But before that… Some folks have asked me how to get signed copies of the book! There are two options:

1) Come to a signing! I’ll be doing a couple of university talks (Stanford and Weber State) as well as the following:

• October 8 - Lofty Pigeon Books (Brooklyn, New York)

• October 11 - Book Soup (Los Angeles, California)

• October 15 - Book Passage (San Francisco, California)

2) Pre-order a signed copy from Porchlight Books!

You’ll also get 30% off. I’ll be signing bookplates to ship with copies of the book on October 8, so if you can’t make it to one of the events but you want my signature, this is the best option. The only catch? You have to pre-order before September 24.

Have I mentioned how important pre-orders are for authors? They help us get better placement in stores, help indie bookstores decide how many copies to order, and help us make it to bestseller lists.

More to come in a few weeks!

There’s nothing quite like that first delivery of “galley” copies for a new book — when the digital manuscript you’ve spent years shaping finally materializes into something real, something tangible, something you can hold and flip and let your toddler throw across the room.

After countless hours staring at words in Google Drive until they no longer make sense, here it is. A book!

This is the early, “advance reading copy” that will be going out to press and reviewers soon. (If you’re a book reviewer, reporter, podcaster, or TikToker interested in an early copy, let me know.)

News on the book will be relatively quiet for the next couple of months, then I’ll be going on tour in early October. Plans are still coalescing, but it’s looking like at the very least I’ll be doing talks and signings in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City. You’ll also hear me on some podcasts and see a few excerpts of the book in outlets like Bloomberg.

Now it’s just a quick 116-day wait until PLAY NICE: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment hits store shelves. I think you’re going to love it. If you agree, you can pre-order (ideally from your local indie bookstore) now!

You can preorder it right here. (Allow me to recommend you do so at your local indie bookstore!)

Blizzard Entertainment is the video game company behind StarCraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft. Any company would kill to have just one of those franchises — Blizzard developed five. For many years, it was one of the most beloved video game companies on the planet. When you picked up a new game and saw that frosted blue logo, you knew you were getting something special.

Yet over the last few years, the Irvine, CA-based video game developer has faced a series of PR debacles, a hostile corporate takeover, and a sexual discrimination lawsuit that eventually led to a staggering $69 billion acquisition.

What made Blizzard so special? How did it come crashing down? What made Activision CEO Bobby Kotick decide to start interfering with Blizzard’s magic, and was it really all that magical for the women who worked there?

PLAY NICE chronicles the history of Blizzard Entertainment as it transformed from a UCLA student’s ambitious dream into an international empire generating billions of dollars of revenue per year, facing all sorts of corporate shenanigans and cultural mishaps along the way. It’s based on interviews with more than 350 people and will tackle the creative struggles and boardroom drama that have made up Blizzard over the last three decades.

You can preorder the book right here. Preorders have a massive impact on store placement, bestseller lists, the number of copies that are printed, and all sorts of other factors that help make it so I can keep writing more books, so please do preorder.

For now, I’m back to editing and factchecking, but you’ll hear much more about the book later this year as we prepare to get it out into the world. Did I mention that you can preorder now?

When I first saw The Case of the Golden Idol, I was repulsed. Just look at those faces. Those beady eyes, gaping mouths, and unsettling side profiles. Sickening. But a tweet from game developer Lucas Pope convinced me to jump in, and what I discovered was one of the best releases of last year — a hearty logic puzzle of a video game that tickled my brain like few others.

Pope himself is the designer of Return of the Obra Dinn, another one of those games that’s been carefully crafted to make you feel like a genius for playing it. Both Golden Idol and Obra Dinn are detective stories in which a bunch of people have been murdered and you have to figure out what happened. Both show you a snapshot of the moment behind each death and ask you to piece together what happened. In The Case of the Golden Idol, you scour tableaus as an omniscient observer, prodding in characters’ pockets for notes and jewelry that might offer clues to the larger story. One farmhand might be holding a letter addressed to him; another might wear a ring whose significance won’t be made apparent until much later. You’ll have to use these clues to fill in MadLib-like scrolls that describe the events of each scene: [blank] wanted to [blank] [blank], so they [blank] [blank] and so on.

Over the course of a dozen cases or so, decades will pass and the grand scope of the story will reveal itself. You can’t change or influence events the way you might in other narrative games, but piecing together this story through gumshoe deduction is just about as satisfying as it gets. This year, the developers of The Case of the Golden Idol released two expansion packs for the game, each comprising three additional missions. They’re both fantastic, serving as a prequel to the main game and tying the saga together in delightful form. They’ve said they’re done with DLC, and I cannot wait to see what they do next.

The developers of The Case of the Golden Idol (who are based in Latvia) have also put out the entire first chapter to play for free on your browser. So do yourself a favor and check it out, even if you find yourself repelled by those faces. The unsettling nature of the art might grow on you (I now honestly love it) — or maybe you’ll just stop noticing when you’re absorbed in figuring out just what the heck is going on with Edmund Cloudsley.

Now on to the roundup…

Things I did recently

• Spent a few months on leave from my day job at Bloomberg News to work on my next book, which is maybe… 80% done?… and will hopefully be published in the fall of 2024. We’ll make a formal announcement hopefully next… spring?… in this newsletter, of course.

• Dug into the saga behind Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the year’s most impressive games, and published a magazine feature about the ubiquitous Final Fantasy series and how it stays relevant by constantly reinventing itself (despite Final Fantasy XVI having some real problems… it’s a game that I’ve really soured on after some distance).

• Detailed the story behind Redfall, a rare flop from Arkane, best known for critically acclaimed immersive sims like Prey and Dishonored. The biggest problem? A studio known for making single-player immersive sims pivoting to a multiplayer shooter, driving away all of the people who had joined to make single-player immersive sims and didn’t want to pivot to a multiplayer shooter.

• Broke news on the struggles of a multiplayer game based on The Last of Us and interviewed folks like the director behind the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 and Double Fine boss Tim Schafer.

• Continued to record weekly episodes of Triple Click, diving into this year’s hottest games and also some old ones, like Perfect Dark and StarCraft II.

Things I liked recently

• PsychOdyssey, the phenomenal 32-part documentary telling the story of Psychonaut 2’s development, is a must-watch if you care about video games even the slighest. And it’s totally free.

• Some good books: It’s Not TV by Felix Gillette and John Koblin, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, and Unscripted by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

• My Perfect Console, an interview podcast by journalist Simon Parkin that’s full of delightful, fascinating guests

• Baldur’s Gate 3. I mean, holy shit.

Early in my adventures through Octopath Traveler II, a new video game from Square Enix about eight people on adventures (hence the title), I ran into a young boy who triggered a side quest. First he asked for a healing grape. So I gave him one. Then he asked for an olive. Gave him one of those too. Then he asked for a grape again and I realized that he was just screwing with me.

I used one of my party members to scrutinize him, giving me a brief description of his inner psyche, and learned that he was a spoiled rich kid whose father, across the ocean in another town, sent him off to find independence. Later in the game, I ran into a rich man whose own inner thoughts revealed the existence of a son. So I used another party member’s ability to get the father to tag along with me, brought him back to the rich brat and triggered a fun little cut-scene that ended the quest.

Most video games would have presented a side quest like this with a series of clear objectives and big flashing markers to show you exactly where to go and what to do. But Octopath Traveler II, following a old-school video game tradition that was likely started to get kids to spend their parents’ money on strategy guides and phone calls to the Nintendo Power hotline, embraces opacity. The entire game is full of quests that give you a few hints and expect you to piece together the rest on your own, like little puzzles that are always a delight to solve. After 50+ hours, I’m still wrestling with some of them, including this one island maze that I haven’t quite solved just yet.

This sense of mystery is just one of the reasons Octopath Traveler II is so great, building on the rough foundation established by its predecessor to create a gorgeous house. (Perhaps even House of the Year?) The first Octopath Traveler had plenty of its own mysterious side quests, but Octopath Traveler II improves upon them with better writing, a more interesting world map and most importantly, an entire structural overhaul. The first game was so formulaic and repetitive, it usually felt like a chore to play. The sequel shakes things up. I haven’t been this hooked on a game since I marathoned Elden Ring a year ago, and that opacity is one key reason.

Games that present you with map markers and task lists can be appealing in a lizard brain kind of way, like going to the grocery store with a pen and a piece of paper and getting a minor endorphin rush every time you cross off the seltzer or chickpeas. It can be fun to blast your way from checkpoint to checkpoint in the likes of Horizon or God of War, especially when they’ve got solid combat and strong stories. But the games that really engage me are the ones that activate my brain — games like Elden Ring, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Outer Wilds, and so on.

I never thought Octopath Traveler II would be on that list. But here we are.

And now for our semi-regular roundups…

Things I did recently

• Published a big feature on the launch of Hogwarts Legacy, the new Harry Potter game from Warner Bros. and Avalanche Software that has been overshadowed by JK Rowling’s views on transgender people.

• Talked with my Triple Click co-hosts about the same topic

• Broke news on this year’s new Call of Duty (a Modern Warfare II expansion turned full release) and EA cancelling a secret Apex Legends/Titanfall project (that was not in fact Titanfall 3)

• Dug into the future of Halo in the wake of mass layoffs at developer 343 Industries

Things I liked recently

• Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg, a fantastic book about the fascinating people who hunt for cryptocurrency criminals

• This old Awl blog post about Dilbert, a comic book series I loved so much as a child that I collected all the printed book versions of them, and reckoning with the repugnant views of its creator, who is getting dropped from newspapers after some racist comments. (An enjoyable quote from the San Francisco Chronicle’s editor in New York Times: “Very few readers noticed when we killed it, and we only had a handful of complaints.”)

• Crypto Island, an illuminating podcast from PJ Vogt that explores all things crypto in entertaining and curious fashion.

• Natasha Lyonne’s wonderful new show Poker Face, an episodic murder mystery series starring a crass but spirited woman who can tell when people are lying. Her catchphrase, “Bullshit!”, is an all-timer.

Congratulations! You’ve made it through another year. Let’s celebrate by talking about some Good Stuff.

Things I wrote in 2022:

• A dive into the rocky development of the next game from BioShock director Ken Levine, whose management style has ostracized and isolated many of his staff. “Ken is a very hard person to work for,” one longtime former employee told me. The game, Judas, was announced at The Game Awards earlier this month but has no release date yet. Levine declined to comment.

• Coverage of Microsoft’s $69 billion mega-deal to purchase Activision Blizzard following last year’s sexual misconduct scandal. I spoke to employees at Activision, Blizzard, and King who all said they were optimistic about the deal. I wrote about CEO Bobby Kotick trying to protect his legacy. I wrote about a small group of testers at Activision forming the North American video game industry’s first union. And I broke one of the year’s craziest Activision stories…

• …that California’s lead lawyer on the case was fired, and her deputy resigned in protest, accusing governor Gavin Newsom of interfering with the lawsuit to protect Activision. (Newsom’s office denied the claim.)

• Scoops including: Suicide Squad getting delayed, Ubisoft turning a planned Assassin’s Creed DLC into a full game, Activision’s contractual obligation to release at least the next three Call of Duty games on PlayStation, polarizing Amazon Games boss Mike Frazzini stepping down, Activision delaying Treyarch’s Call of Duty to 2024, and Blizzard cancelling a mobile Warcraft game inspired by Pokemon Go.

• A review of Elden Ring, one of the best games of the year and of all-time.

• Bloomberg let me write about both Danganronpa and Eiyuden Chronicle lol

• More scoops such as: Sony preparing to unveil its revamped PlayStation Plus subscriptions, the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic remake getting stripped from its developer (seems unlikely we’ll ever see that thing), Ubisoft delaying that Assassin’s Creed game to 2023 (it has since been delayed to even later in the year), Pokemon Go creators Niantic cutting staff and canceling four projects, Take-Two’s Hangar 13 doing the same, and God of War Ragnarok being planned for November despite rumors that it was delayed to 2023

• An in-depth feature on Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games, which has worked very hard to overhaul its culture and become a kinder, friendlier company to employees. (They remain as secretive as possible, though, and wouldn’t participate in this story, for which I had to rely upon employees speaking under condition of anonymity.)

• The voice actor behind Bayonetta put out a video claiming she had been lowballed for the newest game and appealed to fans’ emotions, saying that if they cared about fairness, they’d boycott Bayonetta 3. After some digging, however, I discovered that her story wasn’t quite what it seemed. The story raises a lot of interesting questions about social media, virality, and emotion over truth.

• We recorded and published more than 50 episodes of Triple Click, a video game podcast that, in my unbiased opinion, just gets better and better every year.

• I started writing my next book. More news on that coming next year!

• I’ve also been playing around with some fiction writing. More on that coming next year too! Maybe.

Things I liked in 2022:

• Video games including Elden Ring, The Case of the Golden Idol, and many more

• Better Call Saul, which concluded this year and secured its spot as Greatest Show Of The Modern Era.

• Other great shows including The Rehearsal, Yellowjackets, The White Lotus, Severance, The Dropout, Andor, Abbott Elementary, and many more.

• Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic Story

• Stories from my formidable Bloomberg colleagues on Twitch child predators, the disastrous Elon Musk reign at Twitter, crypto, and much more.

• Books including Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; The Thursday Murder Club, Fairy Tale, and Llama Llama Red Pajama.

• Elmo yelling at Rocco

Happy New Year. I hope you have an excellent 2023.