Co-founder and former president of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime had just revealed his upcoming big project, which was an unveiling a new company called Dreamhaven which is comprised of other veteran Blizzard Staff, as well as two development studios, Moonshot Games and Secret Door.
The studios as mentioned before borrow a significant amount of talent from Blizzard. Morhaime who is now the CEO of the new company, Dreamhaven alongside his wife, Amy who is now Head of Operations are joined by former Hearthstone lead Jason Chayes, Ben Thompson the creative director, and former Starcraft II and Heroes of the Storm director Dustin Browder, who’s a part of Moonshot Games.
Secret Door’s studio head, Chris Sigaty, worked as executive producer on Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and HotS, while colleagues Alan Dabiri and Eric Dodds both have experience across a suite of major Blizzard titles.
“Reimagine the studio model by taking the chances that most big publishers won’t.” is said to be Dreamhaven’s aim. Considered that the two development studios had such distinct development styles, the statement that they made is pretty solidified.
Morhaime spent 27 years at Blizzard before leaving the company in 2018, and many members of the new team have spent a significant portion of their careers at the company. Over the past couple of years, reports have suggested that Blizzard’s new partner, Activision, is pushing for more games at a lower cost, resulting in a large number of redundancies. Many might have left Blizzard due to Activision’s growing influence on Blizzard’s culture and processes.
While the company has only been recently formed, we can expect to see great things from the studio since the person behind it helped build one of the world’s most successful games companies.