Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime left the company he started up in 1991 with his university classmate because he was tired of constantly butting heads with Bobby Kotick.
An excerpt from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier’s upcoming book Play Nice: The Rise And Fall Of Blizzard Entertainment has shed more light on Morhaime’s departure from the company in 2018.
According to Schreier, the Blizzard co-founder was tired of fighting the former Activision CEO on a myriad of issues. Problems reportedly began around six years after Blizzard and Activision merged to become Activision Blizzard, with the cancellation of a World of Warcraft successor project known as Titan.
Following this cancellation – which was said to cost Blizzard around $80m – Activision moved to assert more control over the Diablo maker, and in 2013 Kotick made a deal to buy Activision Blizzard’s independence from Vivendi (Blizzard’s then parent company). Following this, Blizzard was encouraged by Activision execs to hire chief financial officer Armin Zerza to “keep costs in check”, with Kotick clearly bitter about Titan’s cancellation.