Wizards of the Coast appoints World of Warcraft veteran John Hight as president
Hight’s decades of video game experience fits the analog company’s dubious digital aspirations.
Former Blizzard executive and World of Warcraft manager John Hight has been hired as Wizards of the Coast’s new president. Hight will oversee both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, along with the company’s Digital Gaming branch, which is responsible for converting the aforementioned properties into video games.
The tabletop behemoth announced the hire on July 18, just over three months after previous president Cynthia Williams tenured her resignation and joined pop culture plastic extruder Funko as CEO. Hight is a lifelong video games guy, starting his career at The 3DO Company and Electronic Arts in the 1990s, and then Atari in the 2000s, before joining Blizzard as an executive producer of World of Warcraft in 2011. A decade later, Hight took the reins of the entire WoW franchise as general manager while also overseeing development of Diablo 3 and its Reaper of Souls expansion, Hearthstone, and WoW’s Classic servers.
