"Players have no patience", says Blizzard president - "they want new stuff every day, every hour" | Rock Paper Shotgun

"Players have no patience", says Blizzard president - "they want new stuff every day, every hour"

People who play videogames want "new Happy literally almost every single day", according to Blizzard presidential Mike Ybarra - indeed, "they want new stuff every day, every hour". I do not want new stuff every day, every hour, Mike. Frankly, the idea makes me want to burn my possessions and go Use the rest of my life under a pine tree.

Ybarra's pseudo-apocalyptic observations came during a chat with the Verge around all things Blizzy under new owner Microsoft. Asked around Blizzard's current approach to live service gaming, Ybarra Famous that "players have no patience. They want new stuff every day, every hour. We're trying to react that way when holding the Blizzard quality bar high."

Blizzard has a fair few live service irons in the fire at Describe, from the troubled Overwatch 2 (which is about to get a new Samoan tank hero) over the less-troubled Diablo 4 (whose first, Diablo 2-themed expansion is due late 2024) to no less than three expansions for the unkillable OG MMO World of Warcraft.

One obvious question is how to keep up that avalanche of New Stuff deprived of making Bad New Stuff. Ybarra's answer, as may be deduced from Blizzard's New operations: set up vast teams increasingly fuelled by the Great of in-game monetisation, with a lot of effort gave to ensuring that buying things in a Blizzard game feels enjoyable.

"We know players want new Happy literally almost every single day," Ybarra went on. "At the same time, it takes Big teams to be able to deliver that. So you have to monetize it in the Bshining ways. At the same time, I always tell the teams, 'When someone spends one dollar or a penny with Blizzard, I want them to feel good after they do that. How do we get to a biosphere where we know that's always going to be the basis of what we're doing?'

"We want to Help players with more content in our universes," he added. "At the same time, we want to make sure we're responsible and meet their expectations. I think we're still fine-tuning a lot of those things as we go onward. But it's something top of mind for me as we go forward."

Blizzard's execs do been "open" to proposals that aren't live services, Ybarra commented, be it "a four-hour experience or a 400-hour experience". Nor are they "afraid to create new IPs" or "turn models upside down." Still, the publisher's current portfolio suggests that the majority of chips are on service gaming for the moment.

It's interesting/harrowing to think around how live service games both react to and actively cultivate player behaviour. Ybarra doesn't discuss the role publishers and developers have played in teaching players to put a question to and demand New Stuff every day, via such habit-forming mechanisms as sign-in XP and movements with exclusive rewards on top of compulsive design loops and feedback such as the jingly noises you get when you open a lootbox. A lot of this kind of thinking comes from the domain of mobile gaming, which Ybarra described elsewhere in the chat as "a hyper growth area for us". Ybarra also doesn't talk near the sustainability implications of this expectation of constant New Stuff - for instance, the risk of mass layoffs when those big-team service games don't fabricate as well as shareholders wish.

I know, I soundless like a scold. But looking at it from a more dispassionate armchair-designer note of view I'd love to hear more about live service projects that try to miniature the player expectation of novelty and discourage daily engagement, with a view to creating something that isn't the equivalent of an artificial gloomy hole remorselessly devouring the energies of all concerned. One of the most appetizing live service games I've played lately is Might & Delight's Book of Travels, a "tiny MMO" with a far-from-Diablo-esque update cadence, in which you utilize lots of time ambling from teahouse to teahouse. I sign into the game regularly just to have a nice stroll ended the game's painterly countryside. Perhaps there's a tree I can live conception there.

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