
Play Nice
The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment
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Narrated by:
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Ray Chase
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By:
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Jason Schreier
About this listen
From a New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist comes The Social Network for the video game industry, a riveting examination of Blizzard Entertainment's rise and shocking downfall.
For video game fans, the name Blizzard Entertainment was once synonymous with perfection. The renowned company behind classics like Diablo and World of Warcraft was known to celebrate the joy of gaming over all else. What was once two UCLA students' simple mission—to make games they wanted to play—launched an empire with thousands of employees, millions of fans, and billions of dollars.
But when Blizzard cancelled a buzzy project in 2013, it gave Bobby Kotick, the infamous CEO of corporate parent Activision, the excuse he needed to start cracking down on Blizzard's proud autonomy. Activision began invading Blizzard from the inside. Glitchy products, PR disasters, mass layoffs, and a staggering lawsuit marred the company's reputation and led to its ultimate reckoning.
Based on firsthand interviews with more than 300 current and former employees, Play Nice chronicles the creativity, frustration, beauty, and betrayal across the epic 33-year saga of Blizzard Entertainment, showing us what it really means to "bleed Blizzard blue." Full of colorful personalities and dramatic twists, this is the story of what happens when the ruthless pursuit of profit meets artistic idealism.
©2024 Jason Schreier (P)2024 Grand Central PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Jason Schreier's Play Nice is a riveting chronicle of one of gaming's most iconic companies. With gripping detail and unmatched access, Schreier pulls back the curtain on Blizzard Entertainment's meteoric rise, turbulent history, and struggle to balance uncompromising creativity with corporate America's unyielding pursuit of profit. Play Nice is a must-read exposé of the passion, ambition and dysfunction behind some of the most beloved games of all time."—Bradley Hope, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Billion Dollar Whale
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The Culture Clash
- A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding the Relationship Between Humans and Domestic Dogs
- By: Jean Donaldson
- Narrated by: Vanessa Daniels
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Generations of dogs have been labeled training lemons for requiring actual motivation when all along they were perfectly normal. Numerous other completely and utterly normal dogs have been branded as canine misfits simply because they grew up to act like dogs. Barking, chewing, sniffing, licking, jumping up, and occasionally (just like people) having arguments are as normal and natural for dogs as wagging tails and burying bones.
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almost had to stop listening due to the performer
- By AchieveObedience on 08-30-17
By: Jean Donaldson
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Ingredients
- The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us
- By: George Zaidan
- Narrated by: George Zaidan
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Cheese puffs. Coffee. Sunscreen. Vapes. George Zaidan reveals what will kill you, what won’t, and why - explained with high-octane hilarity, hysterical hijinks, and other things that don’t begin with the letter H. Ingredients offers the perspective of a chemist on the stuff we eat, drink, inhale, and smear on ourselves. Apart from the burning question of whether you should eat that Cheeto, Zaidan explores a range of topics.
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Disappointed in the nutrition conclusion
- By Cristi on 01-30-22
By: George Zaidan
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Surfacing
- By: Kathleen Jamie
- Narrated by: Cathleen McCarron
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time.
By: Kathleen Jamie
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Determined
- A Science of Life Without Free Will
- By: Robert M. Sapolsky
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.
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Abridged - no Appendix!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-02-23
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The Plague Year
- America in the Time of COVID
- By: Lawrence Wright
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19 - its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it.
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Best book about Covid-19 I’ve read so far
- By KarenT on 06-11-21
By: Lawrence Wright
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The Book of Why
- The New Science of Cause and Effect
- By: Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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"Correlation does not imply causation". This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades and has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed causality - the study of cause and effect - on a firm scientific basis.
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Great book! Not a great audiobook.
- By rrwright on 05-30-18
By: Judea Pearl, and others
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Horizon
- By: Barry Lopez
- Narrated by: James Naughton
- Length: 22 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.
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Brilliant Wise and Thought Provoking
- By findley on 05-04-19
By: Barry Lopez
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Under the Sky We Make
- How to Be Human in a Warming World
- By: Kimberly Nicholas PhD
- Narrated by: Kimberly Nicholas PhD
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent.
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a book everyone needs to hear
- By John on 01-08-23
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How the Internet Happened
- By: Brian McCullough
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The Internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first "dotcom".
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Critically empty history
- By Keith on 12-19-20
By: Brian McCullough
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Terraform
- Building a Better World
- By: Propaganda
- Narrated by: Propaganda
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In this deep, challenging, and thoughtful book, Propaganda looks at the ways in which our world is broken. Using the metaphor of terraforming - creating a livable world out of an inhospitable one - he shows how we can begin to reshape our homes, friendships, communities, and politics.
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My favorite audio book!
- By RobsRecs on 06-20-21
By: Propaganda
What listeners say about Play Nice
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- Doug C
- 10-29-24
Great insight. Worth a read for any gamer.
A great example of how corporate greed flows into a company and sucks the life out of it until it is ruined. Apply this same formula to any company and you can almost predict how bad a company will get.
Great book. Great reporting.
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- Self conscious NPC
- 10-26-24
Fantastic write up on a legendary company
I loved every second of the dive into Blizzards history. I wish there was more on the topic of the law suits, and “insider” stories
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- Anonymous User
- 11-01-24
Another fantastic book
Jason Schrier kills it again with an exceptionally researched piece on Blizzard entertainment. The focus on one studios entire history keeps this book from feeling entirely as exciting as Jason’s previous works, but it’s still a fantastic book nonetheless.
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- Gigi Earnest-Stippich
- 01-08-25
5 stars for the book 0 stars for Blizzard
As a life long Blizzard Game enthusiast I thought I knew the whole tea and BS That has gradually been breaking my heart. But there is so much I has no idea about and my heart is broken...
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- M. Mardini
- 12-10-24
Great story
Probably my favorite book from the author. A great telling of the story of Blizzard from its foundation to today.
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- Marker
- 04-05-25
How cold the Blizzard is
Another great book from Jason from the Triple Click podcast! Great insight and history on Blizzard. I wish the Blizzard I remember would still be in existence now, Jason describes the pieces today that make it close to impossible to have the same game philosophy. Would read again!
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- Matt Sempsrott
- 10-30-24
Excellent details give color to what you already know.
If you play and follow gaming, none of this will shock you, The level of detail and first hand accounts of the Blizzard story are fascinating and were well worth the price for me. Well written, I have listened to all of Jason’s books and this is my favorite.
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- Shannon
- 10-18-24
Fantastic Narrator
I’ve assumed that I was too stupid for audiobooks for a while. I have pretty high reading comprehension, but audiobooks…I struggle to pay attention for more than 15 seconds. Or so I thought??? I found this audiobook EXTREMELY listenable. The narrator has fantastic diction, and varies his tone constantly. As an example, you can tell when he’s reading a quote, because he had a distinct “quote read” voice; this makes the audiobook a lot easier to understand!
The book itself is kind of a hoot. The author finds the narrative threads and keeps it interesting. I found myself vocalizing IRL many times in shock at something that he revealed. I’m not a certified elite gamer, but the book is definitely enhanced by some surface level knowledge of video games. For example, I’ve never played a Diablo, but when the book mentions they started working on Diablo 3 all the way back in 2000, I was like…oh no lol.
I think this book could become a future classic, too. Compare Blizzard to companies like Boeing or Blackberry - there are obvious lessons to be learned, despite the fact that we seem to keep not learning them. This book is a great reference of how and why the video game industry goes sour, but the pattern echoes across all engineering and technology companies.
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- Gavin O.
- 10-14-24
A Revealing Inside Look Into a Renowned Entertainment Juggernaut
This was a great, all-encompassing synopsis of a sometimes mysterious corporation with new revelations and previously unknown facts that will fascinate anyone who has ever speculated about the inner workings of one of the biggest names in gaming.
Throughout the listen I was surprised by Jason's ability to weave a coherent narrative out of various sources, projects, and insidious rumors of corporate politics.
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- JP
- 10-30-24
Pure Blast of Nostalgia
Was a big Blizzard pc gamer growing up. Very cool to learn the methods and madness that went into creating those games. Last part was business heavy, but overall a good story.
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