Blizzard's president Mike Ybarra is of the opinion that those who play games are always yearning for fresh content and don't like to be kept waiting.
When it comes to live service, Blizzard is spinning a lot of plates right now. It's got Diablo 4, which is due to get its first expansion in 2024, World of Warcraft, for which three new expansions have been lined up, and, of course, Overwatch 2. For each, there's an endless supply of content updates, necessary, according to Ybarra, to meet players' constant demand for new experiences.
"Players have no patience," he says in a recent interview with The Verge. "They want new stuff every day, every hour." While he didn't describe this as a bad thing - enthusiasm is necessary for the survival of live-service games, after all - he adds that providing a supply of fresh content and maintaining quality is something of a balancing act. "We're trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high," he says.
As Ybarra sees it, delivering on both involves putting together large teams and providing paid content that players really enjoy. "We want to serve players with more content in our universes," he explains. "At the same time, we want to make sure we're responsible and meet their expectations. I think we're still fine-tuning a lot of those things as we go forward."
The Blizzard president went on to reveal that the company is open to creating different experiences for players, ones that don't necessarily rely on the live service model. "We're not afraid to create new IPs," he says. "We're not afraid to turn models upside down."
In a separate interview, Ybarra revealed he was open to the idea of reviving Blizzard's long-dormant RTS series StarCraft and suggested that it might not be a strategy game.
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