Blizzard president Mike Ybarra is doing everything he can to meet the demands of the players. However, the quality of the games must not suffer. To achieve such performance, it requires funding from those very players.
What do players demand? Mike Ybarra stated in an interview with The Verge that players want new content daily or even hourly. Fans have no patience, and therefore Blizzard wants to try to meet these demands while maintaining a consistently high level of quality:
Players have no patience. They want something new every day, every hour. We’re trying to respond to that while keeping the Blizzard quality bar high.
Although these are absurdly high demands, Blizzard wants to respond to this player request. However, it would require a large development team to meet these demands. To manage this, the games would need to have the right monetization.
Blizzard would not shy away from launching new IPs. Ybarra is grateful for any idea, whether it be a title with a playtime of 4 hours or a long-term project with a playtime of 400 hours. The main thing is: If a player invests their money in Blizzard, they should feel good about it.
Blizzard held the BlizzCon last weekend. All major announcements have been summarized by MeinMMO author Benedict:
The content Blizzard will focus on in the future
What projects for financing will there be in the future? Both World of Warcraft and Diablo 4, Blizzard’s flagship titles, will be supplied with new expansions. Therefore, Blizzard’s focus remains heavily on live-service games.
In addition to the “Worldsoul Saga,” which opens a new chapter in WoW with a total of 3 expansions, Diablo 4 will head into the wild nature next year. The paid DLC is planned for late 2024 and will be presented in detail in summer 2024. In keeping with the nature theme, the expansion “Vessel of Hatred” will introduce a new class, which is to be the “Spiritborn”.
Ybarra does not reveal how things are going with the survival game that Blizzard announced in January 2022. The game is to be presented when it is “ready to be shown.” It is still unclear how monetization will work in this case.
However, Blizzard has more ideas to ensure “the right monetization” so that players receive new content constantly. The mobile sector is a rapidly growing area for Blizzard that could likely contribute significantly to financing.
In its first year, Diablo Immortal brought in, for example, 525 million US dollars. Germany contributed 3.3 percent to this. Another flagship that is expected to achieve at least a similarly great success is Warcraft Rumble.
The mobile game has been long awaited and has been live for just a few days. A release on PC or console is not currently planned; it is a pure mobile game.
Therefore, we can be curious about which other IPs we will see as mobile variants. If you are currently busy with Warcraft Rumble, you shouldn’t miss MeinMMO’s 3 beginner tips:
