blizzard Blizzard Executives Talk About the Company's Strategy in the Future

[Zadina 923]

Blizzard Entertainment's president and co-founder Michael Morhaime, senior vice president and co-founder Frank Pearce, and senior vice president Chris Metzen had a chat with Venturebeat about the company in general and its future.

 

A large part of Venturebeat's article is dedicated to Blizzard's greatest achievements and its philosophy, things that we all more or less know about the company. The talk about the three executives' goals was more enlightening.

 

First of all, they are watching the innovations in the area of Virtual Reality, but they don't have immediate plans to start development on it. Instead, they think that the future is in mobile games. Frank Pearce mentioned that Overwatch and StarCraft are two franchises that could work as mobile games, especially since the company has deep heritage in real-time strategy. However, the RTS genre needs to be re-invented, since 45-min missions don't work anymore for most players. Michael Morhaime added that there's a big opportunity to develop mobile games that are not 'just casual'.

 

The article also has some impressive stats about the Hearthstone mobile app. Specifically, it has made $500 million since its debut in 2013, and it’s the leader in the $1.2 billion digital card game market. It's one of the top 40 grosses for iOS sales, too.

 

Moving on to a different topic, the three executives highlighted that the company plans to be faster and more efficient with updates for all of its franchises. Pearce noted that one of the greatest challenges is figuring out a way to do more with less manpower. An answer to this challenge would be to make it easier for players to create and share in content in Blizzard games, something that the company wants to expand on in the future.

 

Esports were obviously mentioned as being fundamental during the development of Blizzard games. Lastly, some of the other goals of the three executives are reaching out to and representing a bigger and more diverse audience in their games, as well as encouraging a better ingame behaviour and communication.

 

Feel free to read the entire article here.