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[Varteras]

Some of you may be familiar with Dreamhaven. It is a company founded by Mike Morhaime, a former co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. It is intended to become a major publisher with two of its own internal studios already existing, Moonshot and Secret Door, and being made up almost entirely of former Blizzard developers. Some of them big names from the company like Dustin Browder and Chris Sigaty. Recently, Dreamhaven began announcing partnerships with independent studios. What's exciting is that three of these studios are also made up of former Blizzard developers. Lightforge Games, One More Game (OMG), and Raid Base were the first to announce their partnership with Dreamhaven. Very recently, Frost Giant also announced their partnership as well as a licensing agreement with Epic to use their Unreal engine.

Dreamhaven

Dreamhaven is a game developer and publisher with a deep belief in bringing players together through engaging, high-quality entertainment experiences.

www.dreamhaven.com

Dreamhaven - Partnerships

Dreamhaven is a game developer and publisher with a deep belief in bringing players together through engaging, high-quality entertainment experiences.

www.dreamhaven.com

Lightforge Games is intending to make RPGs while doing so completely by remote. One More Game is also looking to go all remote for its development and create online games. Frost Giant wants to create real-time strategy games. All three of these studios are comprised mostly of former Blizzard developers. It's been no secret that Blizzard has been bleeding talent over the last few years and that rate has accelerated with Jeff Kaplan being the latest high profile departure. For those who don't know him, he was a big name in the World of Warcraft development team and went on to be the director for Overwatch. Many former developers of Blizzard have become tired of the company's failings, some pointing the finger at Activision for slowly poisoning the company ever since the merger over a decade ago. Frost Giant was rumored to have been the result of many of Starcraft 2's developers being fed up with pitching ideas for Starcraft 3 but being rejected with the executives seemingly not interested in making another Starcraft RTS.

Lightforge Games

Lightforge Games is a new, all-remote video game studio on a quest to change how the world plays RPGs.

www.lightforge.gg

https://www.onemoregame.com/

Frost Giant Studios

Frost Giant Studios is a game development studio located in Orange County, California, on a mission to bring real-time strategy (RTS) games to a broader audience.

www.frostgiant.com

Raid Base

We develop experiences that match the level of commitment and enthusiasm that connoisseur players put into the games they love.

www.raidbase.com

Raid Base is a bit of a different story. Most of its team consists of former Riot Games developers who worked on Valorant with some of them having history with Microsoft and Halo. Their goal is to create an open-world sandbox with PvPvE gameplay. With these studios it seems Dreamhaven is trying to recapture what they made at Blizzard. Mike Morhaime's stated goal for the company is to create a place where creative vision is prioritized over worrying about short-term financial gains. Which sounds like a bit of a dig at his former "bosses" who are accused of being creatively bankrupt in pursuit of constant record profits. None of the 6 studios currently associated with Dreamhaven have revealed any of their games and it will likely be a couple years yet before we get any kind of announcements. But it's certainly exciting for anyone who misses the glory days of Blizzard.

Here is a link to an IGN article about some of the happenings within Blizzard

Special Report: The Inside Story of Blizzard's Departures and a Company at a Crossroads - IGN

After high-profile departures, and with major games still a long way from release, Blizzard finds itself at a crossroads. Our special report.

www.ign.com

 

[Kuranghi]

This sounds really promising, but I worry about this "fully remote" businesses trend, I think physical human contact is really important. Its probably responsible for much more inspiration/creative development than people think.

 

[NullZ3r0]

This sounds really promising, but I worry about this "fully remote" businesses trend, I think physical human contact is really important. Its probably responsible for much more inspiration/creative development than people think.

Moon Studios developed Ori like this. Physical human contact is overrated and is a safety net for poor management. A remote workforce just needs to compensate by over-communicating. Weekly meetings need to be replaced by daily standups and everyone needs to have an "open door" policy when it comes to Slack/Teams etc. No cameras off during meetings. Every quarter have a shindig where you invite everyone to central locations to have a drink, eat and just associate.

I worked at a software dev for four years like this. Company ran great

 

[Coolwhhip]

It would make me so happy if they made an MMORPG in the style of World of Warcraft (vanilla/tbc), but I know the chances for that are extremely low.

 

[harmny]

Give metzen a call Mike

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

An open world PvPvE game?

 

[Kuranghi]

Moon Studios developed Ori like this. Physical human contact is overrated and is a safety net for poor management. A remote workforce just needs to compensate by over-communicating. Weekly meetings need to be replaced by daily standups and everyone needs to have an "open door" policy when it comes to Slack/Teams etc. No cameras off during meetings. Every quarter have a shindig where you invite everyone to central locations to have a drink, eat and just associate.

I worked at a software dev for four years like this. Company ran great

Well thats fair enough if you are someone who doesn't really need human contact (introverted or whatever you want to call it) but what about people who are the opposite, they get a bit shafted no? I like making people laugh, I can't really do that through text and video calling sucks for me unless I had a webcam set up in the corner of the room so I could move around the room and not constantly face the camera.

You have firsthand experience of it going really well so I'll defer to your experience since every job I ever had was customer facing or had a close knit team. All I'll say is that for me I need to be in the same room as someone, or at least voice chat with them to interact in a fully satisfying way.

 

[Varteras]

Give metzen a call Mike

I'm sure he has a few times now. Unfortunately, in a recent interview Metzen said he's happy to be out of game development and wants to focus on his new tabletop company. Though he said he might be willing to do games again in the future. Metzen would kill it at Dreamhaven. He's pretty much the mind behind the original stories of every Blizzard franchise. It would also be awesome if they convinced Samwise Didier to join them. He's Blizzard's main art guy. Though he said a while back he has no plans to ever leave Blizzard. That he'd "go down with the ship".