Bobby Kotick says he'd never have raised World of Warcraft's subscription by even a dollar because 'it's a prickly audience, you don't wanna do too much to agitate them'

Bobby Kotick in 2008, after the Vivendi merger that made Activision into Activision Blizzard.

Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard, made a recent appearance on the Grit podcast discussing his career in videogames. One of the threads is Blizzard Entertainment, a studio that Kotick clearly feels is capable of best-in-class entertainment but also one that was in some respects mismanaged: This is, of course, from the perspective of a profit-first businessman.

"A thing I noticed," observes host Bing Gordon at one point, "nobody who's ever left Blizzard seems to have done great… there's some secret sauce there." Which is obviously an over-simplification of the situation: Hundreds of hugely talented but lesser-known names have come and gone at Blizzard over the decades. But it's clear what he's driving at as Gordon names senior leadership like Mike Morhaime and Chris Metzen, which is that sense that nobody's really left Blizzard and created the new Blizzard, or even something close to it.