Usually, when it comes to end-of-year talks for Blizzard, we are all hoping that there will be some significant changes that we all knew would not come, but things are a bit different this year. Dragonflight has been doing pretty well, and other games are also getting regular updates and improvements, and the last we have to share is the update from Mike Ybarra.
Info about new employees
Blizzard has always been the company where the employees and the ones who run it have had a significant impact on the community. Before Microsoft buying Activision happened, this usually ended up in disappointment, as a lot of big names had been leaving the company.
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In the new post, Mike Ybarra talks about how they hired some new faces to the company, such as Jessica Martinez as the new VP of Culture, Makaiya Brown as DE&I lead, J.D. Roux as the new Chief People Officer, Allen Adham as Chief Design Officer, and many others.
One of the most exciting returns to the Blizzard team has to be Chris Metzen, the legend who worked on the Warcraft universe as the senior vice president of creative development. He left the company back in 2016, and having him back to work on WoW is very exciting. We cannot wait to see how WoW Mythic raiding and the story of WoW flows with his return.
Rebuilding the foundations
The post talks about making some core changes, and while there are probably many changes happening behind the curtains, which we cannot see when it comes to their games, we can see that there are many improvements going on. One good example is the new Dragonflight UI, which has changed the WoW UI that has been around for almost twenty years.
One of the changes that Mike talks about with changing the foundations is not on the perspective of the games they are making but also on the team that works at Blizzard. In 2021, Blizzard’s name was somewhat tossed into the mud when various scandals appeared about women being mistreated, going so far that certain employees were stealing breast milk from the fridge.
In 2022 and in 2023, Blizzard aims to increase the representation of women and non-binary people in the company. While the percentages have changed from 22% to 25% so far, they aim to increase this number in the future.
While changing the foundations sounds nice, we hope they don’t stray too off the beaten path, especially once the Microsoft takeover finalizes. The finalization of the buyout will happen in June 2023, and until that happens, we cannot really be sure what will happen to Blizzard and the games they are working on.
