The Power Struggle That Imploded Megan Ellison’s Video Game Unit (1)

In February, Nathan Gary, the longtime leader of the indie video-game publisher Annapurna Interactive, was in Las Vegas for the annual DICE convention, schmoozing with old colleagues and catching up on the latest developments in gaming. One evening at dinner, Geoff Keighley, a video-game industry personality, approached Gary with an unsettling bit of news.

According to people familiar with the conversation, Keighley related that he’d just seen Gary’s boss Megan Ellison — the 38-year-old owner of Annapurna and daughter of billionaire Oracle Corp. Co-Founder Larry Ellison — eating elsewhere in the same restaurant with one of Gary’s former colleagues, a rival executive who he’d helped push out of the studio years earlier under tense ...