Titan failed because of leadership failures—art, engineering, and design all fell short—and because the team was built too large too early without a coherent vision, a mistake Blizzard's hubris after WoW enabled.

(03:09:30) like, "You gotta shut us down. We're just gonna burn money." - What was your intuition about why? So like from my understanding, there was a few issues. So one, with such a gigantic world, which by the way, is a beautiful dream, this kind of universe simulator, because I love... Every game you mentioned there is great. I empathize with the dream. I would love to play that game. But one of the issues, as I

(03:09:55) understand, was that it was unclear what, like, the quest flow is. Like what are you supposed to really do in this game? What's the thing that connects all of the pieces together? - So it was a multifaceted failure for- for many reasons. Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership, myself included. Like, there's just no getting around that. And then on top of that, like, a lot of games you can point to as being like an

(03:10:31) engineering failure, like the, you know, the servers didn't work- ... or like an art failure, like no one responded to the look of the game, or a design failure, like the... it's just not fun or it's tuned poorly. We failed on art, engineering, and design, and I'm cautious about calling out art because some of the best art ever made at Blizzard was made for Titan. My criticism isn't of the art that was created. My

(03:11:00) criticism is that we never had any art cohesion, so the art looked like it could've come from 10 different games. - Mm-hmm. And we should say it cost $83 million across those years. So a large team doing a lot of stuff, but not converging towards a game that could actually ship. - Correct. As, like, a game designer, I use semantics a lot and I like to define my semantics so people know where I'm coming