"Oh, this is gonna be very different": An ex-Blizzard developer's eye-opening year

My visit to Dreamhaven to talk about Sunderfolk, an unusual RPG with one of last year's worst-timed release dates. Blunt talk about what went wrong, what's changing and some surprise successes

Art for Sunderfolk from Secret Door / Dreamhaven

Last spring, Chris Sigaty started to get worried that the video game he and his small team had made—a multiplayer role-playing game called Sunderfolk that used phones to control actions displayed on a TV—might have a rough launch.

Until 2019, Sigaty had worked at Blizzard Entertainment where game launches usually went pretty well. He’d be there for nearly 24 years, helping lead development of Warcraft III and StarCraft II. Those launches were smashes.

“I’d grown up at Blizzard,” Sigaty told me when we met in Irvine, California last month. “It had grown its audience, over game after game after game. And the success of each of those games made the audience hungry to see what was next.”

At his old company’s conventions, the massive Blizzcons, Sigaty and his peers could talk about their upcoming games “in front of tens of thousands of people and really millions of people online,” he recalled.

People noticed. People cared. People got excited.

Since 2020, however, Sigaty has been working at a new company, a start-up in Irvine called Dreamhaven. The new enterprise started with two internal development teams, one of them the Sigaty-led Secret Door. It didn’t have its own convention, nor a legacy of hits.

Dreamhaven was co-founded by Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime, Sigaty’s longtime boss and bandmate in Blizzard’s in-house heavy metal band. Across 2018 and 2019, several senior developers at Blizzard had left, amid project cancellations and tensions with Activision Blizzard management. Some gathered with Morhaime and his wife, Amy, to make Dreamhaven. They hoped to recreate Blizzard’s knack for crafting great games and were optimistic at least some fans would show up to play them.

“There’s this group of people that were paying attention, following Mike,” Sigaty said. “‘Oh it’s Mike Morhaime, he’s doing his thing!’

“But, at scale,” Sigaty realized, “that number is low.”

After years of work, Dreamhaven’s first game, the externally developed Lynked: Banner of the Spark, launched into early access in late 2024. The reception was quiet.

When that happened, Sigaty said he “started getting very concerned.” The problem, he recalled, was “how hard it was to get anybody to even know you were there.” Sigaty began to look at more numbers. He started wrapping his head around just how many video games were coming out each year (more than 10,000). He was thinking more about how people’s attention was already drifting to TikTok and streaming.

“That’s where it really felt like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be very different.’”

And then, a twist: In April 2025, the week that Sunderfolk came out, Sigaty got some awkward proof that a new game from a new studio could grab the public’s attention.