Blizzard's job is to satisfy impatient players who want 'new stuff every day, every hour,' says studio head
The Microsoft era of Blizzard has just begun, and it's not clear yet how the studio will change under the reign of Xbox head Phil Spencer. Maybe it'll mean more StarCraft, maybe not, but from the sounds of it we shouldn't expect a radically different approach from Blizzard: It's gonna keep running on the ol' live service treadmill.
«Players have no patience,» Blizzard president Mike Ybarra told The Verge in a recent interview. «They want new stuff every day, every hour. We're trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high.»
Except for its remasters, Blizzard's present library definitely goes all-in on the «new stuff every day» approach: World of Warcraft (whose next three expansions were just announced), Diablo 4, Overwatch 2, Hearthstone, and its mobile games, Diablo Immortal and the new Warcraft Rumble. Blizzard's next game, an unnamed survival game, will surely be the same way.
Unlike a lot of other studios, you can't really say that Blizzard has abandoned its roots to chase the live service trend: It launched WoW, the most famous subscription-based game ever, almost 20 years ago, and has been building a multiplayer ecosystem since it launched Battle.net in the '90s. Things move faster today, though, and Ybarra doesn't make keeping up sound easy. (And this year's layoffs at Bungie and Epic make it very obvious that it's not.)
«We know players want new content literally almost every single day,» Ybarra said. «At the same time, it takes large teams to be able to deliver that. So you have to monetize it in the right ways … I always tell the teams, 'When someone spends one dollar or a penny with Blizzard, I want them to feel good after they do that. How do we get to a world where we know that's
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