Blizzard Co-Founder Mike Morhaime Launches New Gaming Endeavor Dreamhaven

Mike Morhaime, the cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, has launched a new game company called Dreamhaven, and it has established two new game studios: Moonshot and Secret Door. VentureBeat reports: The Irvine, California-based company is a pretty good clue that Morhaime and his wife Amy Morhaime weren't quite done with games when they left Activision Blizzard in 2018. Mike will be the CEO of Dreamhaven, while Amy will head operations. They have hired a number of (mostly former Blizzard) industry veterans to help run their studios, which will work on separate games. That's an ambitious startup, as working on two games at once is a handful. But it's not without precedent, as Harold Ryan's Probably Monsters startup in Seattle also has two studios working on two games at once. What makes the Morhaimes' company unique so far is that they're funding it themselves. [...] So far, the company has 27 employees across all three entities, and it's hiring more staff. The artwork on the company's homepage combines aspects of both fantasy and science fiction, but the company isn't yet saying what games it is working on, nor is it talking about genres. But it is working on a familiar model, as it closely resembles the way Morhaime ran things at Blizzard, with an emphasis on quality, iteration, and giving creative staff enough time. The parent company's role is to provide guidance and funding, as well as central services that each studio will need, such as communications and human resources. But each studio will make its own decisions about how to make the best games, Morhaime said. The founders have equity in the parent company.

Moonshot's leaders are Jason Chayes, Dustin Browder, and Ben Thompson. Chayes was previously an executive producer at Blizzard Entertainment, where he worked on the Hearthstone team. He also worked at Electronic Arts and Disney. Browder's 25-year career includes roles as the game director for StarCraft II, Heroes of the Storm, Command & Conquer, and The Lord of the Rings. Thompson's credits include creative director for Hearthstone and art director for the World of Warcraft trading card game, with additional credits on Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. Moonshot is also home to a team of seasoned developers who've worked on some of gaming's most popular franchises.

Dreamhaven's second game studio, Secret Door, has a leadership team of Chris Sigaty, Alan Dabiri, and Eric Dodds. Sigaty's roles have included executive producer on Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and Heroes of the Storm, as well as lead producer on the original Warcraft III. Dodds was the original game director of Hearthstone and veteran game designer on World of Warcraft and StarCraft. Dabiri has filled both technical director and game director roles and has worked on Warcraft III, StarCraft II, and Heroes of the Storm. Sigaty was at Blizzard for almost 24 years, working closely with Chayes on games like StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. He left Blizzard at the end of 2019 and to devote some time to family. He also talked with Morhaime and Chayes.

Good Time For New Companies

[rtb61]

This would not actually be a bad time for gaming startups, the existing main stream publishers and developers are such utter greedy customer hating shite, those pissed off customers are looking to jump ship as soon as possible. I don't see any of the major publishing houses surviving intact after their really quite deplorable and abusive behaviour, they have managed to zero out customer loyalty. Their intellectual property, those gaming worlds, becoming worthless, they choked the chicken to death, wont be able to jerk much more profit out of them any more. The silly pricing on years old games though, talk about desperation pricing, their profits must be plummeting and there current games so shite, that they think they can charge more for their old games then the crap that come out over the last couple of years.

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[sinij]

Came to post pretty much this. Gaming industry is all about monetization. To the point that they release 0-day DLC and single player cash shops.

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[DontBeAMoran]

You know there's plenty of indie games out there, right? Those usually have most if not all the qualities of old-school games.

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[drinkypoo]

I've played dozens of those games, most of which I got from humble bundles, and 90% of them suck in ways that most commercial games don't, while still sucking in most of the ways that commercial games do. They generally don't have micropayments, but they often do have endless DLCs, and are less likely to have a GOTY edition or similar which comes with all of them. And they also tend to have terrible graphics, though there are a handful of notable exceptions. That's not cute any more.

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[burningcpu]

That's true, but it seems that the end game for an indie developer is to sell to a AAA publisher at which point they'll update the TOS to incorporate pay to win mechanics and another monetizations, as Rocket League recently did.

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[Escogido]

This would not actually be a bad time for gaming startups, the existing main stream publishers and developers are such utter greedy customer hating shite, those pissed off customers are looking to jump ship as soon as possible.

as the meme goes, well, yes, but actually no. it is true that most big name studios lost a lot of respect from playerbase, however the reality is that nickel-and-dime monetization approach still works, as does pay-to-win. maybe a bit less than it used to 10 years ago, but the overall industry revenues grew as well. so basically gamedevs are stuck between players expecting high quality games at prices that cannot sustain a pipeline of such games without dubious monetization practices, and suckers who will st

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[h33t l4x0r]

-1? It's still a dumb name. Why would a dream need a haven? It implies that someone is hunting dreams. Rethink that name, geniuses.

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[drinkypoo]

Why would a dream need a haven? It implies that someone is hunting dreams.

There's no shortage of dream hunters. We call them capitalists.

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[Zaraday]

I think it's actually a great name, other than sounding like a sequel to Gloomhaven and Frosthaven.

Sad

[Jarwulf]

Blizzard is an archetype of a once innovative company going full corporate. Maybe its inevitable when a company gets that large but its still very sad.

summary

[Swampash]

Activision sucks, and Blizzard now *is* Activision, and there's nobody left there any more who was actually involved in making the magic, so we're trying to get the band back together.

I wonder how it will pan out?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I enjoyed C&C and original StarCraft, I can't say that Blizzard games are anywhere near my "want to play" list these days.

Is Dreamhaven likely to get back to the core of gaming (entertainment) or will it become another Blizzard trying to bleed their customers dry by nickle and diming microtransactions?

sounds promising

[Kokuyo]

Let's see how quickly they sell out.

New and exciting stories

[chispito]

I look forward to new and exciting stories of protagonists that become antagonists.