Blizzard cofounder launches new gaming endeavor Dreamhaven
In the interest of driving conversation away from nostalgia-ism let's talk about the economics of a high-tier game career.Morhaime has now left the company he helped found, and one he sold off eons ago. Now stepping into a new vessel he gets to sell a bit less equity this time around and bring along the cream of his leadership team. No doubt he funded the initial paperwork out of his own pocket, but soon accepted one of the flood of investment offers.It is an old play book yet no one talks about it when the play succeeds. Remember that falling out Martin O'Donnell had with Bungie? Did you notice how Martin moved on to found his own studio, one which successfully shipped a non-trivial game? Now not only does he get all the creative control he wanted, but even all of the financial upside.Video games are so successful even those people getting pushed out of the "golden castle" have the skills and connections to build their own castle. No doubt this would change if games were not such a quick growing industry, but we've maintained that growth for a couple decades now.This I think leads back to a fan favorite topic: unionization in games. For the opposite reason one might think: those successful enough to be "too important too lose" for studios are more likely setup new studios before they ever spend their political capital on unionization. This leaves the suits, who by definition are incapable of setting a studio, and the "bulk of the creative team".Hollywood could unionize because no matter how famous no star alone is capable of walking out the door to make a new studio. Thus the stars and more importantly directors saw the studios as overlords, not future peers. Games does not have that, and it is a core problem the games unionization movement needs to figure out a solution to.