Blizzard Reveals How to Make a Hit Game in 9 Easy Steps
Blizzard Entertainment took aim at team shooters last week with Overwatch, a game so popular that the Overwatch subreddit easily beat out Reddit’s own home page for views on launch day.
Overwatch is just the latest implementation of a company-wide strategy – Blizzard built its success reinventing game genres for broader audiences. In 2004, it targeted MMOs, and World of Warcraft easily toppled EverQuest by an order of magnitude. A decade later, the publisher triumphed again with Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game that stomped that market, passing 50 million players this year.
That philosophy has taken Blizzard from a niche publisher of high-quality strategy games to a juggernaut across a half-dozen genres. But how is it done? Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime and five game leads discuss the answer with Glixel.
Step 1: Pick your genre
“We’re not looking to remake great games. We’re looking to find our own areas that may be underdeveloped,” Morhaime says. “We look at the market and we try to make games in areas where we have something to add.”
In World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, its MOBA Heroes of the Storm and now Overwatch, the company has historically tackled game markets where only the most-hardcore of players battled for supremacy.
Once a genre is selected, it’s time to “Blizzardfy it,”as Diablo 3 game director Josh Mosqueira puts it. “Blow it up and reach the masses.”
Step 2: Ditch everything that gets in the way of players, no matter how traditional
Jeffrey Kaplan spent a long time on the WoW team before transitioning to the company’s aborted Project Titan, which was supposed to be Blizzard’s next MMORPG. He’s now game director on Overwatch and the company’s vice president.
He says Blizzard doesn’t focus on reducing game difficulty across the board. Instead, it preserves a game’s “core fantasy” and gets rid of friction points: needlessly complex aspects where “normal human beings will step away from the computer in a moment of frustration, but the more-hardcore [fan] will stick around.”
Warcraft put exclamation points over questgivers’ heads, for example, so players could easily find them, instead of having to speak with every non-player character. Chris Sigaty, executive producer for Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II, says Heroes took out aspects such as “last hitting” and items to simplify the MOBA experience.
“Heroes took a lot of the accepted norms of MOBA-style games and said, is this all really necessary? Or can we create a really fun experience by cutting a lot of that complexity out?” Sigaty explains. “However, the game has a ton of strategic depth, once you start to understand it.”