Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard at the end of the year in his blog post summarized the state of the company.
According to Ybarra, 2022 was a big year for Blizzard, whose games were played 12 billion hours last year. Meanwhile, their as yet unnamed survival game is preparing, whose team is twice as large as a year ago. He stressed that this will be the company’s first new IP since Overwatch. The head of the project is Dan Hay, who arrived from Ubisoft (he is the producer responsible for the Far Cry games there). We don’t know much more about him. It’s so fixed that it’s coming to PC, and according to a job posting this year, it’s set in a place filled with heroes we’ve never met, stories untold, and adventures never experienced.
Ybarra added that they will bring BlizzCon back to 2023, which has had problems in recent years not only due to the pandemic. In fact, the idea was abandoned in 2020 due to the coronavirus, but in principle there should have been a replacement program in 2021 (it would have been BlizzConline), but eventually Blizzard froze the plans, because discrimination and sexual harassment all ‘inside the company as a result, the reputation of the “blizzards” quickly deteriorated. The company will say more about the return of BlizzCon earlier this year and already has a new lead producer in the person of April McKee.
Regarding Blizzard’s work culture, Ybarra reiterated that the company has added several new hires: Jessica Martinez in the “new position of vice president of culture” and Makaiya Brown as head of diversity, equity and inclusion. According to Blizzard’s president, culture is not an individual job and the company has “assembled a culture team from across Blizzard’s functions to help us improve the way we work.” Blizzard “examined deeply the mission, the vision and the values on which it was built; it’s a project that our staff and players will see the results of in the new year.”
However, as part of Activision Blizzard, Blizzard has also been involved in harassment, sexist cases…
Source: PCGamer
