Although the vice president and executive producer of World of Warcraft says that the new owner has no say in the matter, the opposite is true if we look at what the Redmond-based company has done to Activision Blizzard King from a different perspective.

We’ve already reported on Longdale’s interview, where he said something to the effect that everyone at Microsoft is saying let Blizzard do its thing, let the company be what it’s always been. Bethesda Softworks used to say something like that (the publisher and its parent company ZeniMax Media were bought by Microsoft in 2021), but then it all went out the window a few years later when ZeniMax was reorganized. So the company, and under it Bethesda and all its studios, went directly under Matt Booty, the president of Xbox game content and studios. This was partly due to the failure of their co-op shooter Redfall, while game developer Arkane was hoping for a reboot or cancellation…

Something similar is probably happening under Sony: Bungie was acquired in 2022, and the studio that created Destiny (and is now developing Marathon) was initially left to operate as an independent subsidiary. However, Destiny 2 has struggled, leading Sony’s Hiroki Totoki to say in February that he expects more accountability from the studio’s management over development costs and schedules… and it should come as no surprise that if there’s no positive change for Sony, they could be beheading the studio’s executives.

Changes have already taken place at Blizzard. Activision Blizzard King (ABK) was hit by big cuts at Microsoft’s gaming division, and as a result, the survival game announced for 2022 had to be canceled, even though it had been in development for six years. The ABK Workers Alliance union was formed within the publisher after a civil rights lawsuit was filed against ABK, and they were happy that Blizzard would not remain Blizzard in 2022 due to a labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America union.

So we’re not sure if that’s true…

Source: PCGamer