Mike Morhaime wins 2008 award from OC* Business Journal
by Mike Schramm 
Jan 5th 2009 at 2:00PM
The Orange County Business Journal has awarded none other than Blizzard's own Mike Morhaime with the runner up for their Businessperson of the Year award (the main award went to some CEO of an investment company, much more boring than running a fantasy world full of orcs and elves). The Journal cite's Blizzard's huge successes in a rough financial year as reason for Morhaime's honor.The paper isn't quite completely familiar with what Blizzard does (did you know Diablo III was "released" in June of last year? Don't know why I haven't seen it on store shelves yet!), but there are a few interesting tidbits in there for us, including the fact that WoW was so popular on its original release day that Blizzard had to bring employee copies out to their Fry's to sell them to hungry fans. And Morhaime talks a bit about Blizzard being part of Activision, and reveals the biggest change we've heard of yet since the takeover: "The big difference here is we are one step closer to the public markets. It requires that we spend more time than we used to in educating analysts and investors about Blizzard, where we used to be able to not deal with that side of the business."
So hopefully Blizzard's higherups aren't spending too much time trying to sell stock rather than making great games. He does reiterate, however, that Activision has continued to be hands off (especially as long as Blizzard is making so much money for them), so a lot of the things that fans have guessed are Activision influences are probably decisions that Blizzard themselves have already made. Still, success is success -- pretty good for a guy who started out writing test software for Western Digital. Congrats to Morhaime on the award.
*Don't call it that.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Blizzard, News items, Making money, BlizzCon
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
laina Jan 5th 2009 2:15PM
Awesome! I love the game and to see the makers get such kudos is very rewarding. Keep it up!
Doug Jan 5th 2009 2:26PM
Thumbs up for arbitrary Arrested Development reference. Oh how I miss thee.
bobby Jan 5th 2009 2:46PM
her?
venumus Jan 5th 2009 2:51PM
love the shameless Arrested Development plug
PeeWee Jan 5th 2009 3:03PM
I thought Richard "Lord British" Garriott would win this, seeing that Tabula Rasa is such an enormous success... no wait...
dejoblue Jan 5th 2009 3:51PM
Blizzard simply "was not prepared" for their success. They sold out ALL of their 250,000 copies the first day and had around 150,000 people playing, IIRC, the rest came on after they got their copies for christmas. That first month of december, and a lil bit of November, was pretty smooth considering.
They DID have to scramble to launch new servers immediately, every week was a new 5 or 10 servers as they tried to simply keep up with demand. Those servers that were up suffered from crashes and the infamous "loot lag". There were also frustrating "rollbacks" where the server crashed and was rolled back to a previous point in time. Once I had to walk all the way back across Ashenvale, AGAIN!, very frustrating, and another I had to gather more gizzards in Blasted lands after getting enough to finish my quests there >
dejoblue Jan 5th 2009 3:53PM
But Blizzard gave us free time including 5 days of credit in Novemeber 2004, 2 days in January 2005, 3 days in April , another in June and 2 more in August. During that time they were implementing new servers and getting together to prepare for the expansion, and general server health, by upgrading with 1500 AMD Opteron servers.
They managed to do it, AND keep the majoity of their players happy and STILL expand. THAT is the true success of Blizzard, succeeding with unexpected success.
I personally believe that they were forced to slow down release of their expansion in order to make it more casual and perhaps a lil bit because they weren't prepared, with more personnel coming on and organization of the company etc. I am sure it was freaking nuts around there, but a good nuts.
All indicators were that they were ready for release of BC and then the infamous casual vs hardcore sprang up em masse on the forums and in game causing them to rethink and revamp much of what was BC.
Now with WotLK we have a lot of what was wanted way back during classic's reign. Simply because these things take time.
Make no mistake, had WoW not been so successful we would be in a hardcore raid or die EQ type of game rather than the casual friendly WoW we have now.
So grats to Mike and Blizz for a job very well done.
Bossy Jan 5th 2009 5:45PM
Michael Morhaime is cited in the very first booklet of the very first Warcraft game back in 1992.
In the booklet is a map with places like Goldshire, Moonbrook, Deadmines, Elwynn Forest and the "Medivh Tower". Blackrock Spire, The Black Morass were already there ....
Who would have thought more than 15 years later we would adventure in full 3D in these regions.
Hi Medivh, I was struck when I saw him in the Caverns of time.
Yes Lichael is a little bit of a God and on the same page of the same booklet we see a lot of other heroes: among others Chris Metzen.
I don't think anyone can estimate the influence of Blizz on the PC games industry.
Spicyness Jan 5th 2009 7:28PM
I remember that day when they had to truck copies to fry's. I was standing in line at that fry's. We had called ahead to make sure we'd get our collectors copies and fry's said ya they had plenty. We show up and there were probably at least a thousand people already there. Hard to estimate since it wrapped around the building twice. About 10pm trucks start pulling up offloading extra copies. Right as we get to the front of the line they announce they are out of collectors copies. Still I have my signed original game.
My favorite memory of that night was one of the blizzard employees taking my box opening to the picture inside and saying "I did that fireball" and signing his name right there.
I've been with WoW thru its ups and downs and can say that Blizzard is a great company and Morhaime deserves something for that.
Neil Jan 6th 2009 5:07PM
"In June, it released “Diablo III,” the newest entry in the “Diablo” role-playing game series. "
I wish!