Blizzard's Paul Sams joins Ready at Dawn as new CEO

I have always looked to Paul as one of the finest business heads in our industry, both in skill and personality. He and I have often joked about the possibility of working together again. Mind you, those conversations often took place around drinks or a bottle of wine. The last such conversation just happened to take place at an opportune time for both of us. Paul had already taken the decision to leave Blizzard and move to Austin. I had been looking to separate the non-development centric work at RAD away from the studio. Things seem to fit. As we kept talking, the structure that we sought to put in place seemed to materialize on its own. People often say “be careful what you wish for”. In our case, I'm glad it's coming to fruition.

Running a business, in all its aspects, is a full-time job and although I tremendously enjoy doing that work, I've often found myself with insufficient time in the day to do both the business and the creative to their full extent. I would unfortunately often have to sacrifice one for the other and it seemed for the last six to seven years that I was playing catch-up on both sides. As such, it's been a long standing desire to bring in someone to head the business side which would allow me to concentrate on my primary function as the Chief Creative Officer. However that was much easier said than done. None of the people I had considered in the past were quite the right fit. Considering Paul for the position was nothing but a pipe-dream. He has been someone I've counted on for years and although the idea of him joining seemed enticing, the feasibility was improbable. That is until now.

It is a bit premature to delve into the details of the company's future strategy at this point. Being that I just joined the company, I am in the process of trying to assess what makes the most sense for us as a company, for our employees and for our global player base. The one thing that is for sure is that we intend to continue to try and build some of the best games in the world. While we expect to continue in our tradition of making big AAA games, we will not rule anything out at this point. Great games come in many shapes and sizes these days and we will look to be involved with games that we believe in and that we love to play ourselves. Said another way, we are platform agnostic at this point - just like most gamers. Further, our technology now supports multiplatform development. Since the release of The Order, we have been very hard at work to advance our engine and technology to a place where we can deliver our games on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and one other unannounced platform that you will soon find out about.

Reaching a point where we can develop, own and publish our own games is certainly our aspiration and something that we will actively be pursuing. However, reaching that goal may take some time. As a result, we will continue to explore all viable opportunities to allow our company to make great games. In addition to exploring all opportunities, we are actively seeking a strategic investor that appreciates our talent and potential and can help us to realize these goals.

We want to build, own and publish our own IPs in the future. We are in the process of trying to figure out how we will be able to achieve that goal. As for The Order, it was absolutely the company's desire to own it. We love that game and we are proud of it. Unfortunately, we were at a point in the company's evolution where owning that IP was not possible. We hope to not find ourselves in that position again.

We knew going in that it was one of the conditions of partnering with Sony, so in that sense, there is no regret. With the amount of work we placed in creating The Order as an IP, our initial desire was definitely to retain ownership. But at the time, we also knew that it would take a partner to place focus and effort into all the ancillary work beyond the game itself.

We feel that The Order showcased the fruits of our labor on technology. That was one of the biggest focuses for the team having come from PSP and jumping directly to PS4. The first game was more than anything a launch platform to build upon. And as I mentioned in the past, The Order was never written as a one-off story. There is a lot more to tell as you can see from the way the game ends. We of course have aspirations for the future of the IP and our involvement in its growth.

We would love to be part of building The Order as a franchise. It is an IP that we created, that we deeply love and that we believe in. We cannot say more than that regarding The Order at this time.

First and foremost, I learned that you must put game quality and player experience first in everything that you do. Gamers are not driven to buy games because they have a clever business model, they buy games that are fun and immersive that deliver on what was promised. I also learned that being a trend chaser or first mover is not a key to victory. Our team here at Ready At Dawn needs to make games that they love and that they want to play so that we can get the very best and most creative work out of our developers. Force feeding a development team to chase a business model or game type trend when the team doesn't love it is a likely losing proposition. A happy and motivated team that is making a game that they absolutely love with a leadership team that doesn't force them to ship their game before it is ready is part of that formula for success.

At the beginning, I will be the sole employee in Austin. As our plans materialize and if applicable, we would look to have any publishing headcount reside in Austin so as to ensure that the Irvine studio can maintain its laser focus on making great games without distraction. The entire studio headcount is currently under 100. We intend to closely manage our headcount growth now and in the future so that we can continue to be nimble and maintain our awesome "small company vibe."

Yes, trying to make AAA games that reach and sell to millions of people around the world is exceptionally difficult. I've had the opportunity to be in the heart of that storm for near 20 years with Blizzard. I'd like to believe that I have learned a thing or two along the way that will help to give us an edge in being able to stand out from the clutter. Time will tell what the future holds for us. However, I do feel very confident that this team has what it takes to continue its tradition of delivering critically acclaimed games that each sell millions of units globally.

As a studio, and as you can see from our history, we have always kept a very open mind regarding partnerships, different platforms and new technology. From the PSP, to Wii, to working on 3D on PS3 and finally to the PS4, we have always taken on the challenge of working on projects that the team was passionate about. The same goes for VR. If the passion is there, then we'll absolutely pursue it.

I will continue to be on the executive board of the DSGA and I intend to be a guest lecturer there for many coming years. While we only have one year under our belt at the DSGA, I think that we made incredible progress. Our young team of 20 game makers did a great job building and shipping a small game in less than 5 months called The Calm Before. They learned invaluable lessons on how to lead game teams and how to be leaders in a game company from Warren, our instructors and some to the industry's most seasoned and accomplished veterans, among many other things. We also had two of our program participants selected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list this year, which was one of the many great accomplishments that the participants and the program experienced this year. We are now taking applications for next school year.