Mike Ybarra mentioned his plans in Jason Schreier's new book about Blizzard's history.
If Microsoft hadn’t dropped $69 billion to buy Activision Blizzard last year, we may have seen some dramatic changes to Diablo 4 and Overwatch. In the final chapter of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, author Jason Schreier reports that former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra “had planned to cut down on microtransactions in Diablo 4 and reboot Overwatch,” before he left the studio.
The details about how any of this would’ve been done are not mentioned, and it’s possible it was a plan only Ybarra knew of, but his departure kept it from ever coming to fruition. I suspect it would’ve been an uphill battle trying to argue against the cosmetic shop that reportedly earned the company over $150 million in lifetime revenue. And I don’t know how well an Overwatch reboot would’ve gone over with players who already invested so much time and money into Overwatch 2.
Ybarra, as detailed in Schreier’s book, was unpopular with Blizzard employees ever since he was appointed president in 2021. He angered many of them during an all-hands meeting in February 2023 about Blizzard’s mandated return to office after years of allowing remote work. His plans to “pivot away from the live service model” would’ve probably gone over well with Blizzard fans, but who knows what it would’ve meant for the developers having to do the work to accomplish that.
Of the two games, Diablo 4 seems much less egregious with its paid shop cosmetics. I don’t know what removing a bunch of them would really do other than maybe reduce the number of people who sit on Reddit fuming that the shop exists at all. A real win would be to remove it entirely and expand the amount of armor transmogs in the game, but that would no doubt take loads of work by the development team.
I’d happily take an Overwatch that doesn’t feel like it’s propped up on its pages and pages of microtransactions though. That seems like something that wouldn’t even take a reboot. That the idea even existed in Ybarra’s head at all makes me wonder if there was a growing sentiment internally that wrapping games up in a live service model wasn’t feasible. We probably won’t ever know the full details about any of this unless Ybarra finds time to comment on it while running his totally-not-gambling sports company PrizePicks.
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