I received an ARC from Grand Central Publishing for review.

Play Nice tells a comprehensive history of Blizzard Entertainment, from its three-man founding to after the closing of the Microsoft acquisition in 2024. Jason Schreier draws on a massive amount of resources to build a very thorough vision of the company and the people working inside of it.

Schreier contrasts the larger-than-life stories of Blizzard's founding and key figures with the grounded experiences of everyday employees. He reveals their struggles to create great games within a hostile corporate culture often found in large video game development studios. Schreier highlights the human cost of decisions made by leaders like Bobby Kotick, who is memorably introduced. Jason does this through grounded interviews with developers, HR personnel, QA staff, and others impacted by crunch, inadequate protective policies, and complex compensation models. These interviews, spanning multiple tiers of employees within the studio, provide a solid understanding of how Blizzard became the company it is today.

Jason has a great voice for guiding you along thirty years of hectic video game development history. This is a must read for any fan of Blizzard games, video games in general, and great reporting. I wish Schreier could do this for every major studio.

This is a well-researched, meticulously reported story that will likely come to serve as the authoritative history on Blizzard Entertainment's founding, rise, and fall. The headline and the content line up perfectly. This is an admirable book and likely the best that Blizzard will ever have written about it.

Critics of this book will likely come in two varieties:

type 1: women at Blizzard who were subject to a hostile work environment will likely find the book too gentle and forgiving to Blizzard and its executive team;

type 2: fans of Michael Lewis, the master of nonfiction storytelling, will find that -- despite having a solid narrative structure of founding, rise, and fall -- there's not a clear "story" here and that a lot of the detail feels unmoored from any narrative structure.

I count myself in the second category -- there are five-star business tales and this isn't one of them.

But that doesn't mean it's not a great read! I really enjoyed reading about the company that made the games that absorbed so much of my time in college and after college. I deeply respect the journalistic effort that went into managing all of the sources and interviews. The author's commitment to quality is apparent on every page.

Grand Central Publishing provided an early galley for review.

As a former software developer and a life-long videogame player, this new release caught my attention. And I've played a Blizzard game or two in my time.

There is a lot of history in these pages, both from the people and products that came out of the Blizzard company as well as references to other software developers and games. It will, therefore, appeal a lot more strongly to those who are familiar with and/or interested in the topic. Schreier moves through thirty-three years of videogame history at a fairly solid pace, hitting the highlights (and lowlights) as well as sprinkling in the important notes and recollections of people who were involved.

Having worked for a large computer company early in my career (IBM), I could very much relate to Blizzard's cycle of growth, faltering and reorganization. It was also interesting to see how Blizzard struggled when it came to the role (or lack thereof) of women in the company, and it was appalling to read about the amount of harassment female staff members had to endure within that corporate culture.