Blizzard's Morhaime: Some Companies Happy to Ship Poor Product

Mike Morhaime, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Blizzard Entertainment has been celebrating 20 years of his company. He's also been talking about its philosophy, and that of other game devs and publishers.

In an interview with Gameplanet, Morhaime is asked whether Blizzard has found it hard to maintain a commitment to quality over the two decades. His response his fascinating.

"There's a huge amount of momentum, pressure - we've set the bar very high, and the expectations we have of ourselves and that our players have of Blizzard games is very high, and and no team wants to be the team that doesn't meet those expectations. It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because there's such a commitment to meet a very high bar of quality.

"I think a lot of time, what happens is you get to a particular point in a project, and sometimes companies will say, 'Well, you know, we didn't hit the bar this time, but it's too late, we've worked on this thing too long, let's just go ahead and put it out and next time we'll hit that bar. From now on, we're not going to ship any more games, but this one we're going to ship'.

There's that sort of mentality, and I think it just always starts with today. It doesn't start with tomorrow."

Mike still misses coding game by the way...