Spannendes Ding:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7gr1TaSuFA
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1fz4aoz/ive_been_reading_through_jason_schreier_play_nice/
Around 2017, Zerza had been promoted to COO at Blizzard. Hamilton Chu had a MBA from Wharton and had spent years leading Blizzard’s strategic initiatives group, so he knew how to talk to Zerza. Because of the financial success of Hearthstone, he had enough clout to shield Team 5 from some of the financial pressure that was hitting the rest of the company. However, every time Hearthstone exceeded revenue expectations, the next year targets grew larger. This forced Chu to spend more time in business meetings instead of working on the game. Because Blizzard didn’t have any upcoming games after Overwatch, Hearthstone drew significantly more attention from Zerza and his finance team. There were multiple meetings about the game’s monetization, with finance people pushing for more bundles, more frequent sales, and a 4th expansion every year. Chu and his team pushed back arguing sales would dilute the value of card packs and compared it to K-Mart vs Costco. „You feel good at Costco because it feels like they price everything fairly - they don’t need to put specials on.“
Hearthstone released the well received Dungeon Run mode in December 2017. This mode led to endless battles for Team 5 against Activision executives because the mode didn’t bring in money or encourage players to buy card packs. Around this time, Chu was getting calls from Jay Ong, an ex Blizzard employee who was now the head of gaming at Marvel. Chu went to Ben Brode gauging his interest, who had also grown frustrated with changes at Blizzard. Brode would follow Chu anywhere and missed spending his days developing games instead of sitting in meetings. The two began to discuss in secrecy about leaving Blizzard and coined a code phrase. If someone ever popped into a room and asked them what they were talking about, they had an explanation. „The code word,“ said Brode, „was ‚Dungeon Run monetization.‘“
Chu and Brode left Blizzard in Spring 2018 (around the Witchwood expansion launch). Brode’s departure is noted as being especially painful because he had become one of the public faces of Blizzard. Brian Schwab, an engineer on the original Hearthstone team, remarked „When he left Blizzard, that’s when I knew something was not right. He would have stayed on Hearthstone until the sun death of the universe-that’s how much he bled Blizzard.“