Mike Ybarra takes stock of 2022 at Blizzard, which has included rebuilding the studio’s foundations, its corporate culture and its teams – including Dan Hay (Far Cry) to lead Blizzard’s next survival game .
The end of the year is a good time for balance sheets and Mike Ybarra (the president of Blizzard) is no exception: in an open letter to the players, he outlines the highlights of his studios, mentioning in particular the launches of the extension Dragonflight from World of Warcraft and of Wrath of the Lich King Classicd’Overwatch 2as well as Diablo Immortal – waiting Diablo IV next June and probably Warcraft Arclight Rumble.
(New) titles that have expanded the developer’s catalog and obviously also helped attract new players, since Mike Ybarra boldly announces that Blizzard games have accumulated “12 billion hours of play this year” while ” 50 million new players have joined the Blizzard community” in 2022 – we bet that Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal, both distributed in free-to-play, contributed to fueling this figure, without it being known how many of these players will be permanently loyal.
A year of “refoundation”
We also know that Blizzard’s corporate culture has been undermined for many months now and Mike Ybarra underlines the studio’s efforts to “rebuild its foundations”: the studio has recruited Jessica Martinez and Makaiya Brown respectively in charge of culture and inclusion issues at Blizzard, and Mike Ybarra specifies for example that the feminization of the workforce has increased from 22% to 25% this year, while visible minorities now represent 36% of Blizzard’s workforce (compared to 34% the previous year). If a corporate culture is not determined (only) through numbers, Mike Ybarra says he hopes that players will also see these changes in games and in the way the studio communicates.
This refoundation also obviously involves renewal of development teams Blizzard games. Mike Ybarra, for example, praises the return ofAllen Adam (one of the historic co-founders of the studio), then his appointment as director in charge of design to work on the” title=”
Gameplay
English term difficult to translate designating both the set of rules governing the game and the pleasure of the game. An MMOG with innovative gameplay will offer a unique gaming experience to the player. Similarly, a game claiming “good gameplay” will be fun and engaging.
“>gameplay Blizzard games. He also evokes Holly Longdale, long in charge of the license EverQuest chez Sony Onlinebefore she joined Blizzard to oversee WOW Classic and that she now manages the entire World of Warcraft license as executive producer. Same renewal in the Overwatch 2 team with the appointment last October of Jared Neuss as executive producer or Peiwen Yao as executive producer of Diablo Immortal.
It’s up to everyone to appreciate these developments: a healthy renewal within the studio’s teams or the replacement of the many historical executives of the studio who have left Blizzard in recent months.
A BlizzCon in 2023 and the recruitment of Dan Hay to lead Blizzard’s survival game
And if the letter from the president of Blizzard finally mentions little about the games, it nevertheless delivers some playful information. First of all, Blizzard will finally hold a BlizzCon in 2023. The latest was now in 2019, after a cancellation in 2020 and a modest “ BlizzConline in February 2021 due to the pandemic, followed by a cancellation in 2022 due to the studio’s legal and image setbacks. We therefore bet that the developer intends to reconnect with the players and will have enough new content to feed the announcements of its convention.
In addition, among the studio’s recruitments, we retain more specifically that of Dan Haylong remained one of the emblematic figures of the Far Cry license at Ubisoft (until November of last year). He’s now in charge of Blizzard’s mysterious new survival game (the Blizzard Survival Game), as general manager of the license – he obviously works alongside Craig Amai, the game director of the title.
According to Mike Ybarra, Dan Hay “leads a team that intends to infuse the codes of the survival game with the magic of Blizzard, while shaping [la] the studio’s first new license since Overwatch “. And to specify that the development team of Blizzard’s Survival Game “has doubled in size this year » and that it still has a vocation to expand next year.