Respondent: - and we could make it commercial grade for us and we could help speed up our

time to market on that game. It turns out we did. We were able to do that and it
made our services a lot smaller which is nice because in a game system, you really
want to make sure that you’re managing your footprints so that you can get as
many instances per server as possible.

Interviewer: With that successful experience at Wizards, what made it off the table in favor of
Google for Blizzard?

Respondent: The big query solution and the fact that I could essentially consume the query as
SAS from Google, that is very robust. The proof of concept is very easy. I didn’t
have to have any intermediaries. Google sent two people to our office for six
weeks. We put together this proof of concept on three business use cases and it
worked. It’s super scalable and just the simplicity of that solution is very attractive
to us especially in a sea of custom tech so that’s what I’m working with right now.

Interviewer: Right, you want your developers focused on the things that only they can build and
not on the things that other people have built.

Respondent: Right, it’s the should/could. We could do it or should we do it and I need to focus
people on the things that we should go after. On the Amazon side, they would put
me in touch with particular teams that could help me stitch together the solutions
that would do essentially the same thing. They each kept telling me I need to have
somebody help me stitch it all together and they weren’t working together and so
we really didn’t look at Azure because the type of technology that we were going
for was either AWS or something else and maybe it’s a false binary but it was the
political binary I had to deal with. It’s AWS or something else and so I picked
something that I considered was radically different and stood a good chance of
being best in class.

Interviewer: Got it and as you’re thinking about the overall structure, what, if anything, do you
still have On-Prem and why?

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Respondent: There’s a lot of things that are around Prem and the reason is because we have On-
Prem and we set up all those operations. We’ve got all that gear. We’ve got data
centers all around the world and so our IT group still believes that they’re
considerably cheaper than running the hybrid cloud model saves us money. I think
it’s a threaded needle that’s becoming harder and harder to thread but as the
price of public cloud and the reliability of public cloud go up, I think we’ll see that
strategy shift but right now our data centers on OpenStack are very clearly close to
four nines and even if they go down, a lot of our games with Wurm VR built on
OpenStack solution so they just flipped right over and we capitalized on all those
expenses over the course of three to five years so it may take us some time to
realize that the public cloud is actually cheaper because you can run it as an
operating expense in a given year.

Interviewer: Got it and, of course, there’s always the CapEx versus OpEx and a lot of what I
hear when I talk to folks like yourself both inside and outside of games is that the
evaluation of moving hybrid or moving on Prem to cloud comes when you’re at the
point where your data engineers say it’s now time to upgrade all these fancy
servers that we bought, right?

Respondent: Yes.

Interviewer: Or we need a multimillion dollar cooling system for this block here so where are
you in the time cycle for that?

Respondent: I’m not actually sure where we are because there are so many different data
centers and the data center itself is the purview of the CIO of Blizzard and when
that decision gets made, I don’t know exactly what the schedules are but I agree
100% with you and when I did at Wizards, it was at a time of “Hey, we need to
refresh this OnPrem data center.” Now would be a good time to consider whether
or not we want to lock ourselves into a capital expense or should we shift to an
OpEx that, from a period expense perspective, we’re a highly profitable
organization, both Blizzard and Wizards are very, very profitable and so our PNLs
can take a larger single year operating expense and maybe gain some flexibility in
terms of when we’re not at peak, we can really drive down the operating expense

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 cost over a given year and just manage it a lot more effectively. We definitely did
that at that time.

Interviewer: Yes, so it’s primarily the on-prem is in there because you’ve got the [sub-cost]. You
can handle the operating expense and not really because it’s necessarily providing
what you would say is the superior service. It’s just that there are barriers to exit
there for you.

Respondent: I think so from my outside perspective coming into Blizzard. I haven’t been there
very long but I’d say definitely the case. The on-prem solution and that whole
strategy and capability was built out 10-12 years ago to support mainly World of
Warcraft and ever since, it’s just been easier to pull the trigger on capital
expenses. In terms of refresh, we’ve built the capability so why not continue. I
don’t view it that way. I think that there is definitely an opportunity for us to
really consider things like Google Cloud for data and perhaps AWS for our game
hosting or Azure for our game development but I think that the public cloud still
needs to prove that it can be at an SLA of three nines or higher and I don’t think it
has yet.

Interviewer: Two questions for you. Do you feel like on-prem gives you any advantages in terms
of latency for something like Worlds of Warcraft?

Respondent: Definitely, I think and it’s tough to tell because we have not done side by sides.
From my understanding, I haven’t seen any of those results. Perhaps, they have
them and I’m not aware of them but, yes, because the game is designed around the
notion of us having data centers and so regions are charted and I think that that
charting definitely cuts down on latency. Now, would you need to do that if you
were to deploy the game on a more modern architecture schema that
contemplated a cloud and free horizontal scalability? I think yes, maybe it would
be faster.

Interviewer: Right, and then I noticed when you were talking about moving towards the future
you associated some things with production and some things with development,
why did Azure come up as a potential to stay for development rather than for those
other pieces? What do you feel [Unintelligible] that?

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Respondent: I say that the service fabric product is still going strong [Unintelligible] from what I
understand. I haven’t used it in about a year but those types of technologies can
really speed up game development because, yes, you’re using somebody else’s
proprietary tool on their environment but if it helps you build a prototype for your
game and get it out quicker so you can really test your core loops and understand
whether or not you have something in terms of a game, we should be taking
advantage of it and I saw that with Azure. It was much easier for us to get
something out quickly. Was it more efficient to utilize the compute storage and
network better? I don’t recall their being a significant advantage there but
definitely it was faster development.

Interviewer: In terms of prototyping, would you choose something like that over something like
Unity or Unreal?

Respondent: It depends on the setting. I think from a Blizzard standpoint, Unreal and Unity are
not necessary. They are intermediaries that are beholden to as part of our game
development cycle so Blizzard has its own engines but when I was at Wizards, we
definitely chose Unity because I didn’t want to build a client engine. There’s no
chance I wanted to spend that money. We had to build a rules engine anyway to be
able to play Magic which is such a very complex game. I didn’t want to build a front
end engine as well but Blizzard, no chance that they’re going to need to use a third
party engine right now.

Interviewer: That makes sense. I was just thinking even in terms of what I’ve heard from other
big companies is like when we give our game developers and designers free time to
iterate on the next game that sometimes in order to get to quick proof of concept
like you said you could do with Azure that they would do that on Unity or Unreal
rather than using the more robust internal suite for development.

Respondent: Possibly, although I’ll tell you that Blizzard has some pretty fancy tech for
prototyping on the front end but I don’t really know. I’m not a game developer.
[Laughter]

Interviewer: Sure, and then I’m curious about the timing. You’ve mentioned how you do
outreach during your architecture reviews and you know that after eight years and

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 with you coming onboard, it seems like a good time to re-evaluate your on-prem
versus cloud strategy but I’m wondering what sort of communication sources you
keep up on an ongoing basis and what are the times when you want to reach out or
you proactively want other third parties to be reaching out to you?

Respondent: That’s interesting. I’m fairly plugged in to Gartner Research. I know of Forrester. I
haven’t really spent a lot of time with Forrester but I spend a considerable amount
of time with Gartner and that is platform as a service offering and software and
service offerings. Cloud providers, I was part of their executive program for four-
five years and so I was constantly in evaluation mode frankly and I’ll take calls
from people all the time and I’ll be very straightforward. If I get a call from
someone and most of the time, it’s on LinkedIn or something like that and they’d
say “I’m offering XYZ solution. Are you interested?” I’ll say yes or I’ll say no. they’d
pester me once every six months because [Crosstalk] all the time and I think it’s
my job to do the hand shake on my side as being a potential customer as well in
order to stay fresh on capabilities and solutions so I’d take calls from Amazon,
Microsoft and Google all the time every month or so. I know the first names of each
one of the people on those teams and we talk often. Now, I don’t share with them
everything that we’re working on or I’ve chosen to. I don’t tell Google that we’re
using AWS on things but they’re aware that we’re all talking.

Interviewer: Absolutely, besides talking to those reps directly, what are your top trusted sources
for information about all of the platforms and services that are out there in both
dev tools and backend services?

Respondent: I’m a big fan of the Magic Quadrant from Gartner. That’s a huge one for me. I’ll go
into Gartner and I’ll search for whatever type of solution or type of technology
vertical that I’m interested in and there’ll undoubtedly be a metric quadrant that
shows me who are the up and coming providers, who are the best in class and who
are the ones to avoid. I really like to look at the list of avoiding once. [Laughter]

Interviewer: Are there any other third party people you follow, communities, forums, events
that are important to you in either keeping up to date or problem solving when
things come up?

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Respondent: I am involved with the CIO Forum. I can’t remember the name of it off the top of
my head but I’m in it all of the time on LinkedIn and it is definitely a great place to
say “I’m looking for solving this type of problem,” and I’ll inevitably get two or
three wildly different solutions that people have gone after. I’ve also used it to
help me say “Thumbs up, thumbs down,” seeing them and stimulate conversation
on that so, yes, I’ve used that forum quite extensively. I just can’t remember the
name of it because it’s [Unintelligible].

Interviewer: No worries.

Respondent: It’s something that’s been spread. [Laughter]

Interviewer: Is it LinkedIn?

Respondent: It’s on LinkedIn.

Interviewer: On LinkedIn, look at your groups. It would pop up and you’d say “Oh, it’s that.”

Respondent: I would do it but I don’t want to mess up the computer here. [Laughter]

Interviewer: No, I’m not asking you to do it right now. I might ask you at the end of our call for
two reasons. I may ask you to do that so I’m going to ask you a little bit of a
creative question here. If you were going to describe Blizzard especially the area of
Blizzard that is your domain as a kind of car, what kind of car would it be? Anything
from road legal to racing, what style, brand, type and why?

Respondent: it’s funny you asked me this because I just talked about this in one of my
[Unintelligible] meetings last week.

Interviewer: Cool.

Respondent: Somebody asked me “What is it like to join Blizzard?” and I’m like as a long time
gamer and professional technologist, I [Unintelligible] thinking it was the Ferrari
and it does all these things. It’s super robust. It’s been around for a long time. It’s
a classic but it looks really sweet and modern and then, I get there and I pop the
hood and it’s a very well-maintained but archaic ’57 Chevy and it requires very
special engineers to maintain that thing. By the way, we have those engineers and

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 so it’s very well maintained but it’s not very efficient. It’s definitely not very
scalable and it’s not modular. If a part breaks, I’ve got to go and manufacture that
part for the very first time all over again. That’s how I describe it.

Interviewer: If you were going to describe yourself as a driver of that ’57 Chevy, how do you
drive that thing?

Respondent: 10% above the speed limit. [Laughter]

Interviewer: How come? Why does that come to mind first?

Respondent: Because I’m constantly trying to make sure that this car can run slightly faster than
the speed limit will allow and that’s because I’m always trying to test the limits. I
want to know the upper bounds. I want to know when we tip over. I want to know
that it can do what we need it to do in a crunch and so I will drive it like I stole it.

Interviewer: Who’s on the car with you and why you seem to streak companions to be in the car
with you? Whether they’re people or organizations or programs or suppliers, who’s
in the car with you?

Respondent: Definitely, my top engineer needs to be in the car and be the car whisperer,
interpretative person that can understand the sounds and tell me how it’s
performing. The second person in the car would definitely be the CEO because I
want to show the value of this vehicle. I want to scare this person a little bit. I
want this person to leave with a smile in the face. I want him to understand what
it’s like to be in this vehicle because it really helps me in terms of being the chief
advocate for this platform in the organization to be able to demonstrate its value
and to provide shared context about how it drives. I don’t know. Maybe, I took the
analogy too far.

Interviewer: No worries but that’s the driver that makes you successful in your role. If you don’t
do that, he says “I’m going to get somebody else to drive the car” or “You’ve got
to go to the speed limit” or “By the way, I decided that we’re going to completely
get a new chassis for this thing,” and you don’t have to choose.

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Respondent: I just wanted to show that it’s better than being in an Uber and much more reliable
and much more fun.

Interviewer: Cool, we’ve talked about, from a product perspective, Google, Amazon and
Microsoft. I’m wondering about from the dev tools and live ops perspective because
they have things like Firebase and GameSparks and Play Fab. What do you think
about those?

Respondent: I evaluated GameSparks and Play Fab at Wizards. Play Fab is a very interesting
capability set. I remember James when he first came in to pitch me about five
years ago. He was employee number one of two and they had these big dreams to
create a mobile game platform. What they did is pretty amazing. They went all the
way out to PC games and they build everything on AWS. I found it fascinating when
he sold to Microsoft because I’m like, okay, you’ve got to pull all that and put it on
Azure and see how that works. They’re definitely a platform for the middle tier
and the small tier of game producers. You need a place to go to host your game, to
do A/B testing to be able to have the full data marketing suite behind you and for
then, it’s scalable. You can go on their shared system. You can have your own
private system and now, it’s on Azure so it’s pretty interesting. One of the
limitations that we find is that their e-commerce was not that great in terms of
their rates. I could certainly do better on my own. They were cheaper generally
than Digital River but they had the weird steps strategy and James was always
changing the price so I think it was a pretty immature business model prior to it
being assumed by Microsoft. Now, if Microsoft turns it into their xCloud initiative
which looks like that’s what they’re doing then, I think it’s probably a good thing
for games. It’ll make it much easier for new game companies to have big game
company capabilities in short order. I do know that Play Fab is extremely easy to
implement. We did a POC at Wizards and it was very easy. GameSparks is a little
bit different. GameSparks, I believe, use Photon for their matchmaking and lobby
services. They have a better e-commerce solution than Play Fab did and they’re
much more modular than PlayFab was. PlayFab, you just implement everything and
then you maybe use it and maybe you don’t. GameSparks, you can implement
specific components of it, if I remember correctly. Amazon bought them so I think
Amazon buying Game Sparks is a reason why Microsoft bought Play Fab because I

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 know James, in particular, was trying to get bought by Amazon and that didn’t
work out. [Laughter]

Interviewer: What about Firebase?

Respondent: I don’t have a lot of experience with Firebase.

Interviewer: If you had a number one thing on your wish list for one of these companies. You
don’t have to say this company did do this or this company did do that but from
any of the cloud providers, if you could wave the magic wand and make them
deliver something or create something that would be a huge win for your company
besides give it to me for free, what would that be?

Respondent: Definitely four nines, I think the last mile of solving that four nine problem is in
gaming space, a big deal. I guess second would be make it easy for me to shift my
technology stack over into that solution. Those would be winners.

Interviewer: If you’re going not so much on the immediate tactical but if you were going to say
five years from now, what’s one thing that you’d love to see from a cloud provider
that would help you in your role and where you imagine Blizzard is going in the
next five years?

Interviewer: Microsoft might be really able to help with this one. I’m not sure Amazon can but
Microsoft could really help by breaking down the walls of cross platform play. One
of the challenges that we have in games is that every platform is on its own. You’ll
not have PC players playing with Xbox players playing with PlayStation players. You
pretty much have to be playing in your walled garden. Microsoft has a unique
position to where from a cloud provider, from a game services provider to be able
to seamlessly create cross platform play across PC and their Xbox. If that happens,
I think it’s a big advantage for Microsoft because, frankly, it’s having a hard time
competing with PlayStation anyway on exclusivity so just open up the walled
garden. Tear down the walls and let us play on any device we want. That might be
a tipping point for PlayStation and for others. Now, it’d be super helpful for game
companies because, frankly, we’re spending a lot of resources on trying to build
games for different platforms. It’s not a porting problem per se but it’s definitely a
lot of energy to do it.

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Interviewer: It’s a resource suck and then if you have those resources available, what are some
of the kinds of things that you spend them on?

Respondent: More games, more content and better user experiences, the sky is the limit on
that. I think that the end users spend more money. There are all kinds of reasons
why we should eliminate that waste.

Interviewer: Alright.

Respondent: It’s like the notion of self driving cars eliminate the need for parking lots. Imagine
what you could do with all of those parking lots.

Interviewer: Right, make a park or build a building or have an amusement park.

Respondent: Yes, build affordable housing. Who knows? [Laughter]

Interviewer: Oh, my God. Could we actually really? That’d be great.

Respondent: Those parking structures, just put some windows on them.

Interviewer: Exactly, little tiny houses in every spot.

Respondent: Yes.

Interviewer: Shared water, I have a feeling you and I can go on about that.

Respondent: Yes. [Laughter]

Interviewer: Last thing from me, just whether you had any questions for me.

Respondent: How do you plan to use this? Do I ever get to see your end results in some form or
another?

Interviewer: I don’t get to tell you who my client is but I do get to say that my client is going to
use this both for product development and for outreach efforts and awareness and
communication efforts that are more on target and less annoying. Their goal is to
do this so that they can build the right stuff and then, communicate to you about

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 the right stuff based on knowing things they wouldn’t know unless they listen to
you.

Respondent: Awesome, I love that because I love to talk to people and keep up to date. The
more we can make that efficient, the better.

Interviewer: Absolutely, again, you won’t see the results directly but whoever my client is,
you’ll hopefully see an improvement in both their products. That sounds awfully
familiar to things that you’ve suggested or said would help and you’ll hopefully also
see communication strategies that work for you.

Respondent: Great.

Interviewer: My last question for you is I’m interviewing everybody in this list with 10 full time
employees up to folks such as yourself. Folks such as yourself, much, much, much
harder to get to and I know that you’ve got that CIO group and your own personal
network. We have a thing where basically anybody that you find for us that goes
ahead and completes the interview, we send you $200.00 in addition to the
$400.00 that we’re going to send you in an online Visa card which is really an
honorarium. You’re doing this to help the industry, not for the money but it is a
thank you because we know that it does take time and energy so if you have
interest and willingness to connect us with some of your AAA colleagues, anybody
at the architect or PM level whose making those evaluations and decisions all the
way up through your level where you’re thinking about the larger business and
technical problems, that would be so appreciated.

Respondent: Yes, I definitely have a couple of folks that come to mind that I’ll definitely share
your information. Is there a good way to do that? What’s the best way to share?

Interviewer: My preferred way to share is if you send them an email saying “Hey, this was
awesome,” and you should get in touch and copy me and say “If you’re interested,
she’ll give you more details.” I can send you a boiler plate for that.

Respondent: That would be great.

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Interviewer: Similar things where you just take that same message and you post it in a LinkedIn
forum and say “Hey,” because we’re getting down to the wire. I’ve got about a
week to finish and that’s got about another 10 use to find so I’m struggling a little
there. Any help you can provide would be great so what I’ll do is I’ll just contact
you with something you can share with people and to the extent that you can,
again, we’ll keep track and we’ll send you some money and you’ll know that the
benefit is my client is going to be listening to them too.

Respondent: Awesome, I’ll do it. That’s great. I love it. I love the idea that you’re making things
better for all of us.

Interviewer: We’re trying. I love my job and I love talking to folks like you. this is instructive
and enjoyable and a great start to my week.

Respondent: Same here.

Interviewer: Take good care. Thanks. Is LinkedIn the best way to message you?

Respondent: Yes.

Interviewer: Okay.

Respondent: Either one.

Interviewer: Either one, alright. I’ll probably just send you stuff at both. Thanks so much.

Respondent: Thank you.

Interviewer: Bye bye.

Respondent: Bye. [Pause]

- End of Recording -

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