Why World of Warcraft’s lead designer just started his own studio

On July 3rd, 2014, after 17 years of working at Blizzard, Rob Pardo penned a farewell post on the Battle.net forums. He was leaving his role as Blizzard’s chief creative officer to "pursue the next chapter" in this life. At the time, he had no idea what that was going to be. He spent the first year of this extended sabbatical spending time with his family and finishing construction on a new home. He took some nice, long summer vacations.
But after a year, he started dabbling in games again