Unfortunately Blizzard is done.
There's some debate to be had if that's a bad thing, but it's now a brand and IP holding company with some in-house development.
There's some debate to be had if that's a bad thing, but it's now a brand and IP holding company with some in-house development.
Seems like Mike Ybarra is a 'Mr Business' type coming from Microsoft XBox who brags about "growth and engagement across services for Gaming at Microsoft" on his LinkedIn (which I don't think bodes well for removing the crazy micro transactions).
Jennifer O'Neal isn't that amazing either... she was the head of Vicarious Visions who have never made original IP, and let's be fair, have basically made mediocre games except for Destiny 2.
Well it's right in the name, so I'm not sure why you'd expect them to build out their own visions.
Anyway, Blizzard has a lot of IP that people already like, doing work in the same universe is mostly fine. Open a side studio to develop new and different things.
A positive example is, Sucker Punch with Ghost of Tsushima. Sucker Punch could have kept banging out InFAMOUS games but they created a wonderful, beautiful game.
A negative example is CD Projekt Red with Cyberpunk 2077 which came out at roughly the same time. The game was a mess and they flushed billions of dollars of goodwill and future pre-order money by bad management decisions that forced a release before Christmas, and put the devs through a crazy crunch.
Now when bringing this back to Blizzard, let's take WoW as a first example... the main game works on having an exciting expansion which is analogous to creating new IP. Player subs rise with good expansions (BC, WotLK, Legion) and free fall with bad ones (WoD, MoP possibly but I think that was more a style issue than substance).
If Blizzard is to thrive I think it needs to create compelling new iterative games (like WoW xpacs and D4), but also totally new compelling like Overwatch.
It used to be that Blizzard never "missed" with its releases. You could buy a Blizzard game, in a genre you never played, and you were guaranteed a great time. I'd say 'Classic' Blizzard (before Activision) had Nintendo-level quality. Now Blizzard has the problem of never "hitting".
Add in the terrible work conditions and fans are put into a terrible situation of loving something made by a company that isn't worthy of admiration.
Imho, new leadership needs to have the ability to execute in a big way to overcome the current trajectory, and that's going to take carefully calculated, and well executed risks... something that the new co-leaders have yet to demonstrate having.
They could easily spend tens of millions completely retooling leadership and eventually anyone toxic, and it would be worth every penny.