Top 50 Michael Morhaime Quotes

As our players have become more experienced playing ‘World of Warcraft’ over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content.

A lot of the successful Blizzard games that you know actually grew out of failed projects. That was the case with ‘World of Warcraft.’ We canceled a project and decided to work on that one.

I don’t think consoles are necessarily our best opportunity for ‘World of Warcraft.’

We’re basically responsible for making sure you have a great time. If you buy a Blizzard game, we want that to be a great experience.

I would say a lot of us here think being called a geek is cool. A lot of us at Blizzard identify with it.

I think if you’re a small studio, you’re living or dying by the success of the next project, it takes a lot of superhuman effort – or at least it did for us.

2013 is going to be a very important year for eSports. We see this as the beginning.

There’s no such thing as ‘next time we’ll do it better.’ Do it better this time.

As a spectator eSport, I think ‘StarCraft’ is really exciting, engaging, and interesting to watch. As a player, it just really has something for everybody.

Blizzard has definitely evolved around crunch. In our early days, we crunched crazy hours to get the games done.

‘Lost Vikings’ and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing’ were pretty critical games to us. We got some acclaim as a result, some video gaming awards. Those are the games that impressed Davidson and Associates and led to the merger talks.

When we were making games in the early ’90s for the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, popular games didn’t have any real story.

Activision and Blizzard both believe that we’re in an expanding market where we can reach more people across multiple platforms, geographies and age groups. Both of our companies are positioned very well to take advantage of those trends to keep lowering the barriers to get more people into gaming.

‘StarCraft II’ is a really great game. It appeals to players on multiple different levels.

I think people are interested in watching what they know and what they care about, so as you have more people where gaming is a huge part of their life, they want to see what the top players in the world are able to do.

We love BlizzCon. It’s great. It’s our favorite thing to do. But first and foremost, we’re a game company, and we have to make sure we deliver good quality games for our players.

We’re thrilled to see eSports continue to grow in popularity around the world.

Activision has their own games. Blizzard has our own games. We’re not going to go in and fire their people and they aren’t going to come in and fire any of ours.

If you’re going to create a competitive game and it’s going to be popular, you have to have an esports ecosystem around the game.

Of course, we create a lot of heroes. But the real intention of that is to make the player feel like a hero in all of our games.

We want gaming and e-sports to be something that is welcoming and appropriate for everybody who wants to come and watch.

When you think about ‘World of Warcraft’ as a social network, and you think about the future version of Battle.net as Blizzard’s social network, then you wanna stay connected to your social network.

When you launch a game, you really don’t know how many people are going to show up.

We felt it was very likely the fee would be a deterrent for people, and that ‘WoW’ would not sell as quickly as some of our previous games.

The cool thing about ‘Hearthstone’ is, in terms of accessibility to competitive play, it’s very accessible. Anybody can participate in these types of things.

I think at one point there were three television channels showing ‘Starcraft’ tournaments in South Korea. We were so unprepared for its success.

I think every year we get better at running BlizzCon. The scale of the event is so large and I think people appreciate the logistics involved in putting on such an event.

I’d been with Blizzard for almost 28 years when I stepped down.

One thing we wanted to take from traditional sports with ‘Overwatch League’ – we have city-based teams. There aren’t really any other models where you have a global city-based league. But you do have teams that are based in a location.

If we were to choose to do something on a console, the merger with Activision is going to be extremely helpful.

I was always fascinated by technology and wanted to understand it so when I went to UCLA I studied electrical engineering figuring they knew how things worked.

We’d always felt that it would be cool to put the player into the world of ‘Warcraft’ as a single character, exploring the land and meeting other players, but it really wasn’t until 1999 that we thought it was feasible to do it.

One of the design goals for ‘Starcraft 2’ was to factor in better features that would make a better viewing experience for e-sports.

‘Starcraft’ is a fairly strategic game with depth.

Focus is so important when you’re making games.

‘World of Warcraft’ was not always a smooth situation. People who played ‘World of Warcraft’ during the first year can attest to that.

There’s the saying that perfect is the enemy of great, because if you strive for perfection you’ll maybe never ship. There’s a point that’s good enough. But I do think that there’s so much competition out there that if you don’t hit the quality bar, the product will just fail.

You should take your reputation very seriously and try to build a track record you can be proud of.

I want to thank all of the talented and hardworking people at Blizzard for their dedication, creativity and passion. It has been a privilege to lead this team.

We looked at the sales of ‘Warcraft III,’ which at the time was the bestselling PC game of all time, and we said, ‘That’s got to be our ceiling.’ We were wrong.

BlizzCon is a great example of how positive and uplifting gaming can be.

E-sports used to be this niche thing. We knew it was really cool, but outside of a very narrow audience you really didn’t get a lot of exposure.

I’ve met several times with the Activision guys and we’ve talked at length about Blizzard’s philosophy on game development and game publishing and all the things that are important to us at Blizzard. We found that we shared a lot of the same values.

‘Diablo 3’ was never really designed to be an eSport, and not every game necessarily needs to be an eSport.

A ‘Starcraft’ showdown between humans and AI itself will be interesting.

From a development standpoint, at Blizzard Entertainment one of our values of course is commitment to quality.

Activision is structured with independent studios and they give their independent studios quite a bit of autonomy.

The popularity of eSports was inevitable.

If you put smart creative people in a room together, great things are possible.

ESports is a big part of ‘StarCraft II,’ and I think it adds a lot of longevity to the game.