Dreamhaven Showcase Pulls Back Curtain on Former Blizzard Leads’ New Adventure

Five years ago, when Mike and Amy Morhaime founded Dreamhaven, I spoke with several of the founding members about their vision for the company. In our interview, they told me about wanting to build a sustainable publishing and support pillar for game studios, both the two they were founding at the time (Moonshot and Secret Door) and other partners they chose to work with.

At the end of our interview, Mike Morhaime shared a rather bold goal for the new company:

"We want, if I may be so bold as to say, to be a beacon to the industry," he told me, referring back to the company’s lighthouse logo art. "There's a better way of approaching the business of games and the operation of a game company that can produce great results, both in terms of products and financial reward and work environment, and that maybe can help elevate the entire industry."

Around the time Dreamhaven was founded, studios spun up by former AAA leaders wanting to build something better and more sustainable were cropping up everywhere with bold promises for the future. But in the years since, the industry has weathered a global pandemic and economic instability, mass layoffs (still ongoing), studio closures, and project cancellations. Many of those visionary studios have shut down before they could release anything at all, or deferred their dreams years down the road.

Not Dreamhaven. Today, Dreamhaven partnered with The Game Awards for its first-ever showcase, in which it presented not just one or two games, but four. Two are internally developed: Sunderfolk, a turn-based tactical RPG with couch co-op is coming out on April 23, and newly-announced Wildgate is a crew-based first-person shooter about performing space heists (we previewed it, by the way!). The other two games are developed externally, but are being published and supported by Dreamhaven: one is Lynked: Banner of the Spark, an action-RPG from LA-based developer FuzzyBot that’s already out in early access and is getting its 1.0 launch in May. The other, Mechabellum, is a turn-based tactical auto-battler from Chinese studio Game River that looks exactly like the sort of thing a bunch of former StarCraft developers would be into. Mechabellum released last September, but with Dreamhaven’s assistance, Game River hopes to keep it updated and fresh long-term.

That’s a lot going on all at once for a fairly new games company! But that’s not all Dreamhaven’s up to. The company is supporting ten other external studios – several of which are similarly started and staffed by ex-AAA developers – in various ways, including investments, consultancy, and fundraising support. Sometimes it involves publishing support, but not always. Speaking to Mike Morhaime at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week, he tells me that from the start of Dreamhaven, its leaders have wanted to form a “net” of sorts to “capture some of this great talent that was dispersing” across the industry.

“We saw all these studios starting up and we have a lot of relationships,” he says. “We knew a lot of the folks starting up and we wanted to create a structure that allowed us to be helpful and root for these studios, and so we created a structure that allowed us to provide guidance and advice to some of these studios and be incentivized to want them to be successful.”

All week at GDC, I’ve been hearing discussions of the ongoing industry crisis, and the role in which prioritization of profits over all else has played in the wave of cancellations, shut-downs, and layoffs. I ask Morhaime how he feels about the tension between craft and business, but he doesn’t think the two are mutually exclusive. But he does believe you can’t make a good game if occasional failure isn’t an option.

“I think in order to create an environment that allows for innovation, you have to have a certain amount of safety and a certain amount of space to be able to experiment and try things,” he says. “We're certainly not against these products being successful and making a lot of money. I think it's about the focus. What are these teams focusing on? And they're not focusing every day on how they maximize profitability at every step. They're trying to make the best experience possible, which we think in the end it's the right business strategy anyway and positions us better to be successful in the long run. There's so much competition, you know this. There are so many games that are released every year. I think the really only way to be successful is to stand out with something special.”

With Dreamhaven and many of its partners largely staffed by AAA veterans, I ask him a two-sided question: what’s the biggest lesson he took away from his time at Blizzard, in AAA? Morhaime responds that while there were many, one of the more important was the necessity of an “iterative” game development process.

“It was never linear. It was never this straight line where you have this perfect plan and you execute the plan and everything goes according to plan and happiness and success follows. We always encountered obstacles and things that didn't work the way we thought, and we had enough flexibility and adaptability to address those things along the way. So, I think just approaching everything with that kind of perspective where we want to be experimental, we want to try things. If things aren't working, we want to be able to go back and fix them so that we end up with something that we're very proud of."

On the flip-side, then, what’s the biggest difference between how he used to work at Blizzard, and how he works now? In a word: agency.

“Probably the biggest difference, this is such an experienced team, and so we're structured in a way that really gives a ton of agency to our leadership teams in the studios,” he says.

“And so, it's I think just a very unique environment in terms of the relationship that our studios have with the central company. The central company or the central teams are really there to support the needs of the studio, and our studio heads and leadership, they're also founding members of Dreamhaven. So, it's really more of a partnership.”

Our discussions turn to new technologies, wherein lies another ongoing tension in the games industry: generative AI. Though the technology is unpopular among gamers and nerve-wracking to many developers, many AAA gaming companies are beginning to implement it behind the scenes…or even out in the open. Dreamhaven isn’t shying away from the idea, Morhaime says, but so far his company’s use has been quite cautious and limited to research on best practices or internal policy drafting. It’s not being used in Dreamhaven’s games.

“On the one hand, I think it's super exciting, as a technologist, as someone who just loves what technology can do. This is starting to happen in our lifetime. I think we're very privileged to get to see the birth of something so fascinating. Just a couple of years ago, I'd never imagined that generative AI would be able to do some of the things that it's currently doing. There are a lot of complexities around it, legal, ethical, it's also super hard to extrapolate out what this means to the way we live. I think it's undeniable that it will impact all of us in all sorts of ways that we can just speculate on now. I think a lot of those ways are going to be very positive, and some of them are scary, but I also don't think you can just shut it off and put it back in a box. And if you try to do that, it's not going to slow down, it's not going to stop. But I think the people who ignore it and pretend it's not there will be at a huge disadvantage.”

Okay, what about a less controversial new technology, the Nintendo Switch 2? Sunderfolk and Lynked are both coming to Switch, and while Mechabellum can be forgiven for being Steam-exclusive given its genre, the Switch was notably absent from Wildgate’s otherwise multi-platform announcement. Morhaime isn’t saying any more about that, but he does offer commentary on the new console generally:

“I think console transitions can be very disruptive, but they can also be very invigorating and helpful for the games industry,” he says. “As a gaming startup, I think console transitions are a positive for us. If you already have games and you're selling, then there's some disruption maybe to worry about, but we don't have that problem. And as a gamer, I think console transitions are exciting.”

As we wrap up I ask Morhaime if he feels Dreamhaven has succeeded in the mission he laid out for me five years ago? Is Dreamhaven a “beacon to the industry”? Morhaime doesn’t think so…yet. They still need to release some games, and see what the response is from players and the industry at large. “We have to put out some games that people love and we have to be financially successful, because if we aren't either of those two things, nobody's going to look at us as a beacon for anything,” he says.

“Really what I want to see happen is for Dreamhaven to build a reputation with gamers that the brand stands for something, a seal of quality, hopefully, that hopefully there's some trust that we've built up where players know that if a game is coming from Dreamhaven, regardless of genre, that it's going to be something very special and they'll want to have the curiosity to check it out.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.