Quotes from Michael Morhaime

As you start to see more respected advertisers coming in and looking at esports, you're going to find that there's a lot of interest.

We'd really like for BlizzCon to be something that the people who really really want to go, if this is something you're really passionate about, you want to be here at BlizzCon, we'd like it to be possible for you to get here. When we are selling out in a couple seconds, it's really not possible for a lot of people that really want to come.

ESports is a big part of 'StarCraft II,' and I think it adds a lot of longevity to the game.

Blizzcon is a Blizzard show. It's not an Activsion/Blizzard show.

When you think about 'World of Warcraft' as a social network, and you think about the future version of Battle.net as Blizzard's social network, then you wanna stay connected to your social network.

It was controversial when we were settling on what the races should be in 'Warcraft 3!'

'World of Warcraft' was not always a smooth situation. People who played 'World of Warcraft' during the first year can attest to that.

The great thing about 'World Of Warcraft' is that you can sit down in your lunch hour and do a couple of quests and still feel like you've had a meaningful experience, rather than it feeling like you've got a second career.

We'd always felt that it would be cool to put the player into the world of 'Warcraft' as a single character, exploring the land and meeting other players, but it really wasn't until 1999 that we thought it was feasible to do it.

Well, the team that created 'Starcraft 2' is probably the most experienced real-time strategy team in the industry - there are members of that team who have worked on all our RTS games going back to 'Warcraft.'

As our players have become more experienced playing 'World of Warcraft' over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content.

A lot of games that preceded 'Warcraft' made the assumption that this type of game wouldn't appeal outside the hard-core audience, so that's what they targeted. We thought this type of game could appeal to more people if we made it easier to use.

A lot of the successful Blizzard games that you know actually grew out of failed projects. That was the case with 'World of Warcraft.' We canceled a project and decided to work on that one.

We looked at the sales of 'Warcraft III,' which at the time was the bestselling PC game of all time, and we said, 'That's got to be our ceiling.' We were wrong.

I think if you're a small studio, you're living or dying by the success of the next project, it takes a lot of superhuman effort - or at least it did for us.

With a very small team you can create compelling content and reach a large audience.

The popularity of eSports was inevitable.

Blizzard has definitely evolved around crunch. In our early days, we crunched crazy hours to get the games done.

I've met several times with the Activision guys and we've talked at length about Blizzard's philosophy on game development and game publishing and all the things that are important to us at Blizzard. We found that we shared a lot of the same values.

'Lost Vikings' and 'Rock 'n' Roll Racing' were pretty critical games to us. We got some acclaim as a result, some video gaming awards. Those are the games that impressed Davidson and Associates and led to the merger talks.

We want gaming and e-sports to be something that is welcoming and appropriate for everybody who wants to come and watch.

Well, 'Diablo III' went from no players to over 10 million in a very short period of time. It's really difficult to predict that type of response.

'Diablo 3' was never really designed to be an eSport, and not every game necessarily needs to be an eSport.

I want to thank all of the talented and hardworking people at Blizzard for their dedication, creativity and passion. It has been a privilege to lead this team.