Blizzard Entertainment - J. Allen Brack Interview
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J. Allen Brack, who became Blizzard Entertainment's president after Mike Morhaime left the company back in 2018, recently talked to Game Informer about his way of steering the Blizzard ship. He went over his experiences as World of Warcraft's executive producer, spent some time discussing Blizzard's e-sports endeavors, and reiterated that Blizzard remains a PC-first company despite its recent console and mobile experiments.
Here's a couple of questions to get you started:
Previously, your main focus was World of Warcraft. Now you have a new focus: watching over all of Blizzard's games. How has the job transition gone?
I mean I’m a fan of all the things that Blizzard’s done. I’ve put thousands and thousands of hours into Diablo. Lots of time into StarCraft, both StarCraft when it first came out and StarCraft II. I’ve been a fan of all the games that Blizzard has made even before I worked at Blizzard. It’s not easy to love all my children equally, I guess as it were. In terms of the job, I think it’s been pretty hard honestly. But one of the things we’ve said is that we have more games we’re working on now than in any other point in the company’s history. And that’s very exciting. Being able to see those products, see those games, see those things that the team’s really excited about – that’s what gets me up in the morning.
What do you think you bring to leadership at Blizzard that's different than Mike Morhaime? What different priorities do you bring?
I think Mike is a great human and he’s a good friend, and I have just a tremendous amount of respect for him as a human and a tremendous amount of respect for what he’s accomplished. One of the things I would say that’s happened is we’re investing more in games, to create more games, to create more content. We have lots of people in the community, we have lots of fans, and they’re all hungry for the things that we can create, and so we want to give them more of that. That’s been the internal, and I think the external company message as well. Really, we’re focusing on games, we’re focusing on development.
