Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard Entertainment, has written a book explaining what would have happened if Microsoft had not bought Activision Blizzard King.

We’ve already mentioned Bloomberg editor Jason Schreier’s book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. In it, Schreier covers the company’s past in depth, and here he mentions Ybarra’s unfulfilled plans when he left the company. He had some bold ideas, but we feel that Activision, the other half of the company, would have interfered with them…

Ybarra would have been involved in Diablo IV and Overwatch 2. He would have cut back on microtransactions for Diablo IV, and Overwatch would have been rebooted. We haven’t heard any further details on this, so it may have been Ybarra’s own idea. It would have been an uphill battle for him, though, as Blizzard made over $150 million from Overwatch, and we’re not sure the Overwatch reboot would have been a huge success, as the second game was essentially the same as the first, and a lot of people spent a lot of time and money on “number two”.

Ybarra wasn’t very popular inside Blizzard when he was promoted to president in 2021. He pissed off a lot of employees in February 2023 when he ended remote work (which had been offered for years!), but moving away from the live service model would have won him points with hardcore veteran fans, but we dread to think what the developers would have thought of him if they had to do the redesign work.

In the case of Overwatch, maybe we shouldn’t even need a reboot, just take out the tons of microtransactions. But that would make the free-to-play model unsustainable, and we saw with Concord that the pay-to-play method might not work for them.

Source: PCGamer