"Ex-Blizzard Leaders Unveil New Venture at Dreamhaven Showcase"

Five years ago, when Mike and Amy Morhaime founded Dreamhaven, I had the opportunity to speak with several of its founding members about their vision for the company. They expressed a desire to establish a sustainable publishing and support pillar for game studios, including the two they were founding at the time, Moonshot and Secret Door, as well as other partners they intended to collaborate with.

At the conclusion of our interview, Mike Morhaime shared an ambitious goal for the new company:

"We want, if I may be so bold as to say, to be a beacon to the industry," he said, alluding to the company's lighthouse logo. "There's a better way of approaching the business of games and the operation of a game company that can produce great results, both in terms of products and financial reward and work environment, and that maybe can help elevate the entire industry."

Around the time Dreamhaven was founded, numerous studios led by former AAA executives emerged, each promising a more sustainable and innovative future. However, the industry has since faced significant challenges, including a global pandemic, economic instability, mass layoffs, studio closures, and project cancellations. Many of these visionary studios have either shut down before releasing any products or have had to postpone their ambitions indefinitely.

Not Dreamhaven. Today, Dreamhaven partnered with The Game Awards for its first-ever showcase, unveiling four exciting titles. Two of these are internally developed: Sunderfolk, a turn-based tactical RPG with couch co-op, set to release on April 23, and Wildgate, a newly-announced crew-based first-person shooter centered around space heists, which we've had the chance to preview. The other two games are externally developed but published and supported by Dreamhaven: Lynked: Banner of the Spark, an action-RPG from LA-based developer FuzzyBot, already in early access and scheduled for its 1.0 launch in May, and Mechabellum, a turn-based tactical auto-battler from Chinese studio Game River, released last September, with Dreamhaven's assistance to keep it updated and fresh.

This represents a significant amount of activity for a relatively new company like Dreamhaven. Beyond these four games, the company is also supporting ten other external studios, many of which are led by former AAA developers. This support ranges from investments and consultancy to fundraising and sometimes publishing support. Speaking with Mike Morhaime at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week, he explained that from the outset, Dreamhaven's leaders aimed to create a "net" to "capture some of this great talent that was dispersing" across the industry.

Wildgate - First Screenshots

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"We saw all these studios starting up and we have a lot of relationships," he said. "We knew a lot of the folks starting up and we wanted to create a structure that allowed us to be helpful and root for these studios, and so we created a structure that allowed us to provide guidance and advice to some of these studios and be incentivized to want them to be successful."

Throughout GDC, discussions revolved around the ongoing industry crisis, highlighting how the prioritization of profits has led to cancellations, shutdowns, and layoffs. When I asked Morhaime about the tension between craft and business, he emphasized that they are not mutually exclusive. However, he believes that to foster innovation, there must be room for occasional failure.

"I think in order to create an environment that allows for innovation, you have to have a certain amount of safety and a certain amount of space to be able to experiment and try things," he said. "We're certainly not against these products being successful and making a lot of money. I think it's about the focus. What are these teams focusing on? And they're not focusing every day on how they maximize profitability at every step. They're trying to make the best experience possible, which we think in the end is the right business strategy anyway and positions us better to be successful in the long run. There's so much competition, you know this. There are so many games that are released every year. I think the really only way to be successful is to stand out with something special."

With Dreamhaven and many of its partners staffed largely by AAA veterans, I asked Morhaime about the key lessons he learned from his time at Blizzard. He highlighted the importance of an "iterative" game development process.

"It was never linear. It was never this straight line where you have this perfect plan and you execute the plan and everything goes according to plan and happiness and success follows. We always encountered obstacles and things that didn't work the way we thought, and we had enough flexibility and adaptability to address those things along the way. So, I think just approaching everything with that kind of perspective where we want to be experimental, we want to try things. If things aren't working, we want to be able to go back and fix them so that we end up with something that we're very proud of."

On the other hand, I asked about the biggest difference between his work at Blizzard and his current approach at Dreamhaven. He summed it up in one word: agency.

"Probably the biggest difference, this is such an experienced team, and so we're structured in a way that really gives a ton of agency to our leadership teams in the studios," he said.

"And so, it's I think just a very unique environment in terms of the relationship that our studios have with the central company. The central company or the central teams are really there to support the needs of the studio, and our studio heads and leadership, they're also founding members of Dreamhaven. So, it's really more of a partnership."

Our conversation then shifted to new technologies, particularly the contentious topic of generative AI. While many gamers and developers are apprehensive, numerous AAA gaming companies are adopting it. Dreamhaven, Morhaime explained, is taking a cautious approach, limiting its use to research on best practices and internal policy drafting, not incorporating it into their games.

"On the one hand, I think it's super exciting, as a technologist, as someone who just loves what technology can do. This is starting to happen in our lifetime. I think we're very privileged to get to see the birth of something so fascinating. Just a couple of years ago, I'd never imagined that generative AI would be able to do some of the things that it's currently doing. There are a lot of complexities around it, legal, ethical, it's also super hard to extrapolate out what this means to the way we live. I think it's undeniable that it will impact all of us in all sorts of ways that we can just speculate on now. I think a lot of those ways are going to be very positive, and some of them are scary, but I also don't think you can just shut it off and put it back in a box. And if you try to do that, it's not going to slow down, it's not going to stop. But I think the people who ignore it and pretend it's not there will be at a huge disadvantage."

Shifting to a less controversial topic, the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2, I noted that Sunderfolk and Lynked are coming to the Switch, while Mechabellum is Steam-exclusive, and Wildgate was notably absent from the Switch announcement. Morhaime remained tight-lipped about Wildgate but shared his thoughts on the new console:

"I think console transitions can be very disruptive, but they can also be very invigorating and helpful for the games industry," he said. "As a gaming startup, I think console transitions are a positive for us. If you already have games and you're selling, then there's some disruption maybe to worry about, but we don't have that problem. And as a gamer, I think console transitions are exciting."

As our discussion concluded, I asked Morhaime if he believes Dreamhaven has achieved the mission he outlined five years ago. Is Dreamhaven a "beacon to the industry"? Morhaime feels they are not there yet; they need to release games and gauge the response from players and the industry.

"We have to put out some games that people love and we have to be financially successful, because if we aren't either of those two things, nobody's going to look at us as a beacon for anything," he said.

"Really what I want to see happen is for Dreamhaven to build a reputation with gamers that the brand stands for something, a seal of quality, hopefully, that hopefully there's some trust that we've built up where players know that if a game is coming from Dreamhaven, regardless of genre, that it's going to be something very special and they'll want to have the curiosity to check it out."