Former Blizzard President Founds DreamHaven

Former Blizzard President, Mike Morhaime has established a team of former Blizzard Entertainment veterans and has founded Dreamhaven, a new video games company.

Morhaime’s vision is to make Dreamhaven a conglomerate of small development studios, acting as the parent company of its two new studios, Moonshot and Secret Door. Dreamhaven will provide development resources and will also publish all its games.

Moonshot is being directed by three former Blizzard employees, Executive Producer Jason Chayes, Game Director Dustin Browder, and Creative Director ben Thompson. The three have years of experience working for titles like StarCraft 2, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm.

Morhaime shared a few words about the difference of starting a games development studio in 2020 when compared when he was younger.

“Some of the things that were particularly difficult the first time around are going to be a little bit easier this time,” … “We aren’t starting with no money. We’re not having to write all the tools ourselves. There’s a lot of technology that’s available pretty reasonably for us to be able to build off of. And the business climate is a lot more friendly to game development start-ups. So it’s mostly exciting. Maybe 10 percent, you know, scary.”

Secret Door will be led by former Hearthstone Executive Producer, Chris Sigaty, he will also work with former Blizzard’s employees like Eric Dodds and Alan Dabiri. Sigaty shared some insight of how DreamHaven managment will take a developer-friendly model.

“One I can think of is during ‘StarCraft II’ in late 2009. I distinctly remember being in the room and there was this call we had to make about whether we would ship before the end of the year. We thought we could do it, but it was going to take everything and it wouldn’t quite be there. The quality level wouldn’t be there. And Mike said: ‘You guys need the additional time. We should just push this back.’ And that’s a horrible conversation. I know he’s going to have to deal with other people down the line, but Mike was just leading with what was right by players and by us as developers. That happened time and time again.”

Source: GamesIndustry – The Washington Post

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