Last week, at DICE, I spoke to Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime about his role at the company and how he sees esports — including Overwatch League — evolving in the years ahead.

Morhaime co-founded Blizzard back in the early ‘90s, steering it toward enormous success. He’s perhaps best known to the gaming public for his his annual appearance at BlizzCon where he addresses hordes of fans attracted to Blizzard game worlds like Overwatch, StarCraft, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo.

Morhaime is one of the most wealthy individuals working in gaming today, with an estimated net worth measured in the billions of dollars. I asked him what inspires him to go to work every day, given that he could retire at any time.

“I see what kind of impact we have”

”We’re heads down,” he said, “focused on what we’re doing in the office, day in and day out. But it becomes real when we’re at a live event with real people. I see what kind of impact we have on them.

”Or when I sometimes travel overseas to some obscure places, I see Blizzard fans who’ve been playing our games for years. Just hearing the stories of what being part of this community has meant to them … that’s the moment that puts it in perspective and I realize that we’re having an impact on a lot of people.”

How much direct influence does he have over the games that are being made at Blizzard, now that the company is so large?

“Everybody at Blizzard has to do everything I tell them,” he jokes. “I’m just kidding. My input is about as much as you any other passionate person at Blizzard. Our teams are very in tune with their games and with what the community wants. They’re usually pretty far ahead of me when it comes to thinking about what’s what’s right for the game. But I can offer some opinions, you know, and they’ll take that into account. But I don’t want them doing everything that I suggest.”

The big league

He said there’s “still more to do,” for him, in terms of making games, most especially multiplayer games, which is a longstanding passion for him and for his company.

Blizzard’s big break came when, inspired by the real-time strategy game Dune, Morhaime wanted to make a game in which players could face-off against one another. That game was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.

”The stuff I’m most passionate about is creating experiences that are bringing people together,” he said. “Like esports. I’m very excited about the stuff that’s going on with Overwatch League.”

Overwatch’s pro league began its inaugural season late last year, with a second round taking place last week. Blizzard has its own Los Angeles arena for games, with the finals taking place this summer.

”With esports, we’re at an inflection point right now,” Morhaime said. “There’s a lot of interest from sponsors, traditional sports owners and media companies who are all trying to make sense of what’s happening. They’re figuring out how to become involved.”

“We had the ability to intentionally design the ecosystem in a thoughtful way”

Morhaime said there are a set of values that separate Overwatch League from some of the more freewheeling esports initiatives of the past. “We had the ability to intentionally design the ecosystem in a thoughtful way, modeled after what we’ve learned in regular sport and from esports over the years,” he said. “Our take was to fix some of the problems that exist.”

Specifically, he’s interested in the hometown model of regular sports. “For a lot of the other esports, it’s really tough for the team owners to make any money. We want a system that allows the team owners to be able to run a profitable business, to build something that they own, that will have value.”

“We’re iterating on our penalties to try to make them more effective”

In Overwatch League, teams can’t be relegated into lower divisions. Like many U.S. sports, each team has a permanent slot in the league. “We’re building up to a point where they will have the rights to their own local venues,” he said. “They’ll be able to do all the things that traditional sports teams are able to do, like merchandise, concessions and sponsorship. Building a loyal, local fan-base around the teams will help create celebrity around players.”

In Overwatch League, all players are on contracts, and are paid a salary. Players are also given media training, so they can handle the press and public scrutiny. These are all issues that have plagued esports, which often operates like a wild west saloon.

The League attracted some unwelcome publicity earlier this year, when it emerged that Kim “Geguri” Se-Yeon, one of the world’s most skilled players, had not been signed by any teams. Geguri is a woman. Various weak excuses were given by team managers for her exclusion, at the time. But now she’s been signed by Shanghai Dragons.

Morhaime said he’s “thrilled” that Geguri’s been signed. “We share the desire to have more women involved in gaming in general, and especially esports,” he said. “The current state of things is that that there aren’t that many women who are playing at that level, so hopefully this is the first of many that we’ll see in the in the future.”

Changing games

A focus on games that connect people with one another is bound to come with a price. I asked Morhaime what he’s doing to combat toxicity in multiplayer games like Overwatch.

”This is a topic we feel is very important,” he said. “We’re looking at it from a lot of different angles. We’ve tried machine learning to identify toxic speech within the games and I think we’ll continue iterating on that.

”Players certainly have the ability to report other players when they see somebody else violating rules. We’re iterating on our penalties to try to make them more effective and more of a deterrent. But this is a big problem and I’m not suggesting that we have solved it.”

Another challenge facing Blizzard is where next to focus its attention. This is a company that has generally worked on a small number of games, building fandom and excitement around games that attract huge numbers of players.

“We take the best of everything and merge into to something new”

I asked if there’s a process in place for coming up with new ideas, particularly given that Overwatch marked a big departure for the company, which had previously not been known for shooters. The game’s development was also troubled, at least in its germination.

He said it usually starts with the games that Blizzard employees are playing, that were made elsewhere. Inevitably, the conversation turns to whether or not the company can do a better job.

”We look at this game with these elements and then we look at other games that it might be crossed with,” he said. “We take the best of everything and merge into to something new.”

That’s certainly been the case with Overwatch, which took multiplayer, team-based combat and gave it a vigorous shake. There’s no knowing what Blizzard might do next, though Morhaime gave me a parting morsel.

He spoke about StarCraft: Remastered, which was released last year as an updated version of the 1998 real-time strategy classic, a game that did as much as any other to kickstart esports.

”It’s been received really well,” he said. “So I think there’s opportunity for things like that in the future.”

In the meantime, it’s more likely that Morhaime will be looking forward, making new additions to games like Overwatch, while shepherding the Overwatch League. Still, I ask him if he might like to be more specific about which old games might get the “Remastered” treatment. ”I’ve said too much already,” he smiled.