Hrát fér - Vzestup, pád a budoucnost Blizzard Entertainment – Schreier Jason (2025)

This gripping report explores the dark fate of the celebrated video game studio Blizzard Entertainment. Founded in the early 1990s by a few friends fresh out of university, the company became known around the world just a few years later through enduring classics such as the Diablo series and World of Warcraft. Blizzard won players’ hearts above all through its development principle that the joy of playing came before everything else. The passionate project gradually became an empire with thousands of employees and billion-dollar budgets, only to be absorbed by the even larger corporation Activision. The studio’s autonomy was not to last: a single serious setback and one cancelled project were enough for its parent company to begin dismantling Blizzard from within. Poor games, mishandled public relations and mass layoffs followed, turning Blizzard into a byword for decline. In this book, Jason Schreier draws on interviews with more than three hundred current and former employees to tell the compelling story of a company that was always more than just a game studio. The contents are in Czech.