From the Blizzard News Feed: Message from J. Allen Brack — All News — Blizzard News
Blizzard Community…
Over the past few months, I’ve met with many people throughout Blizzard, talking about how we create our future. One thing that remains constant: we are committed to creating epic games and entertainment experiences.
Our development pipeline is strong, and we have the largest lineup of games that we’ve ever had. At the same time, Blizzard tries to have a level of craftsmanship and excellence in all that we do. Maintaining those standards as we continue expanding these worlds takes both time and talented developers.
With that in mind, we have plans to add to game development. We are dedicated to bringing you more content across existing game franchises and bringing our unannounced projects to life. Esports and the Overwatch League are also important priorities, and we will continue to produce great competitive content.
To better support these priorities, we need to reorganize some of our non-development teams. As a result, we will be reducing the number of non-development positions in North America and anticipate a related process in our regional offices over the coming months subject to local requirements. This was an extremely difficult decision, and we want to acknowledge the effort of everyone who has contributed to Blizzard. To assist with the transition, we are offering each impacted employee a severance package that includes additional pay, benefits continuation, and career and recruiting support to help them find their next opportunity. These people are members of the Blizzard family—they’ve cared deeply and contributed greatly to our work here and we are extremely grateful for all they’ve done.
As difficult as some of these organizational changes are, I am confident in Blizzard’s future and we will continue working hard to live up to not only our mission, but your expectations. We look forward to sharing everything with you when it’s ready.
J. Allen Brack
We’ll also increase our focus on adjacent opportunities with demonstrated potential like esports for Overwatch League and Call of Duty. We’re stepping up production on our incubation efforts faster and increasing our investment in live services, in our tools, in our Battle.net platform and in new areas like our fast-growing esports and advertising efforts, but all with an intense focus on excellence, so we never disappoint our players.
On the other hand, the relatively consistent monthly active user trends for Blizzard’s communities were not matched by in-game net bookings, which continue to soften. In particular, Overwatch and Hearthstone, both experienced sequential declines in net bookings from players making in-game purchases.
Specifically as we reallocate resources and hire new talent, we are planning for the number of developers working on Call of Duty, Candy, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo to increase in aggregate by approximately 20% over the course of the coming year.
Question about making Overwatch Free-to-Play
Alexia Quadrani
Thank you very much. I guess, my question is given one of your competitors’ decision to launch a free-to-play Battle Royale game, are you rethinking the monetization model for any of your game maybe including Overwatch?
Coddy Johnson
Sure. This is Coddy. Thanks for the question. I guess, maybe a couple of key points. First, stepping back, one of the things that sometimes gets lost in the discussion on economic models is the player and game experience itself. Our North Star is to deliver a compelling and engaging gameplay full stop. Without that there are no economics. The second point is that the economic model has to work with the franchise and the community and the gameplay. They need to work to reinforce each other and we feel like we’re in a pretty unique position, honestly across the industry and that we have multiple business models running at scale across our franchises today. We have free-to-play games, micro transaction-based games, games with an upfront charge or with a subscription. We also now have advertising, which is growing as well. And we think that provides a range of options for our product and development teams to look across and pair the best economic model with the best gameplay experience.
One thing we know though is that we need to be able to move more quickly and we need to be able to rapidly evolve with the demands of our players in the market. And that’s why as I mentioned, we are investing significant development resources in our core franchises to be able to move more quickly on behalf of our players and to be able to take advantage of new business models. On the free-to-play part of your question in particular, obviously the most proven platform is mobile. So as we increasingly bring Activision and Blizzard IP to the mobile space, you will see us deploy more free-to-play models. Embedded in your question that was also the fact that we see competitors now on PC and console going free-to-play and I just emphasized again that we believe our investment and resources coupled with our strong IP leaves us in a really good position to take advantage of evolving business models in our industry.
The last thing, I’d say and it’s just worth mentioning is that the success we see with titles like Call of Duty or even recent competitive launches shows that a really well-built well-polished AAA experience for players can come still with an upfront charge and it can be a great player experience and a great business model. So looking ahead, we’ll continue to evaluate all our games across our franchises and use the models that we think best both for the player experience and for our business.
Question about Overwatch’s game quality/updates/content Tim O’Shea
Yes. Thank you for taking my question. So with Overwatch League season two launching soon, I just thought it made sense for an update on that franchise. It’s been over two years since the game launched and we’ve talked on prior calls and again on this call about the lower revenue levels. So I’m wondering, what the strategy to address this issue? And does Blizzard have the development capacity to deliver sufficient levels of new content into this franchise? Thank you.
J. Allen Brack
Thanks for the question. This is J. I think it’s important to mention the job the team has done with Overwatch. We feel really strong about the overall IP, the universe, the characters and the story potential, along with the global appeal for the game and we really built Overwatch League around that with early good results. Delivery of more content in Overwatch is something that’s really important and something that we’re focused on. The team is delivering new heroes and new maps and new experiences. And as you mentioned, the game revenue has declined recently. I think the community engagement with the game remains strong.
There are a lot of new ideas for the Overwatch franchise. We feel like, the Overwatch that you know is just a small part of what we can imagine for the overall franchise and the team has a very clear plan. In order to deliver on that, we’re going to increase the size of the Overwatch team meaningfully. But keep in mind that that’s going to – we need to balance the existing live content with new products and different kind of support for Overwatch League. I’m really confident that the community will be very excited when we kind of release the things that we’re working on.
Regarding Overwatch League specifically, we saw a great community response and lots of early success. That took a lot out of focus. But overall, we think it’s the right decision. It’s been the right decision for the game and the franchise. We’re about to kick off the second season and that’s going to start on February 14. That will introduce eight new city teams. It will introduce home and away matches for some teams for the very first time. And the first match that’s actually going to kick off is going to be a repeat of the grand finals between London and Philadelphia. So overwatchleague.com is where you can see that.
This has been posted as a reference for discussion related to the events of today. As a reminder, I am a forum MVP (which this post has nothing to do with that role), but I DO NOT represent Blizzard Entertainment. Please keep discussion civil everyone. Thanks.
71 Likes
And you don’t want that. You think you do but you don’t.
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I’m glad they’re confident because I can see the writing on the wall.
If you work for Blizzard, I hope you start working on your resume and start stealing the post it’s and pens from the supply closet, because this company is going to be dead in 5 years.
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Hell yeah. So instead of 6 skins per event we’ll be getting 7. FeelsGoodMan.
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This could be good, they are moving resources from non-development areas and putting them into development of games. this could mean more frequent and impactive changes.
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Yes, we don’t. At least not at the expense of everything else.
They (those that were fired) don’t care about this empty acknowledgement. This is to make the masses think they made the correct decisions, they’re trying to convince others into thinking they made the right decision.
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They make 7.5b in profits in a record 2018 and couldnt afford game development? Give me a break.
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I would like to extend my sympathies to the 800 staff who just got laid off through no fault of their own. What a nice way for them to be told they’re suddenly surplus to requirements…
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It is the right decision if it makes the company money and makes games better, game companies are businesses if there is a way for it to make more money they will do it, businesses are suppose to make profit people
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I doubt that reinvestment is part of the plan. This is about profit at the top, regardless of Mr. Brack’s damage control statement.
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Activision Blizzard just made their largest ever yearly profit. Don’t give me that nonsense. XD According to their own figures they are FAR from going broke.
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All I read was that they were going to be focusing more on new games and esports which is not really what I am into… however, it is the Activision way.
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Almost makes it seem like they’re lying about their profits. That or Blizzard games weren’t close to the majority of the profit, making them a liability. We gotta remember, Activision Blizzard makes more games than just the ones with the Blizzard logo. Either way, not a good look.
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its best to stay optimistic. based on how far the stock has fallen over the past couple of months, I would assume we have scared the higher ups enough to actually put any sort of decent content out. im not saying what they are doing is right or wrong, im just saying that this could be a good thing in the long run.
This sounds like a basic PR response
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Of course! Wouldn’t want to frighten those all important investors…
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Some people will never stop defending them. They will cover their eyes and ears, yet open their mouths when someone brings up their mistakes.
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Never said they were, they prolly think that doing this move will make the company more profit, that is the function of a business., to make as much profit as possible
Isn’t that depressing? I find it depressing. Hey Jim you’re out of a job because paying you a wage means we make less profit. It’s just business you see. Bye Jim.
Never mind the giant pile of cash we JUST gave our new CFO. Don’t look at that.
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Be layed of sucks (has happened to me) but guess what thats life, crappy stuff happens, you just pick yourself up and move on