Jay Wilson talked about Activision's influence on Blizzard.
At the 2022 Portland Retro Gaming Expo, Jay Wilson, the lead designer of Diablo III, shared that he didn't want the free-to-play Diablo Immortal and discussed the influence Activision had on Blizzard.
He said that Activision’s effect on Blizzard was "like a frog in a boiling pot of water": at first, it felt like nothing but then, the products that were newer and making money had a lot of pressure on them to produce. For example, for Heroes of the Storm, the company was "crashed" with meetings and actions, where the teams were always talking about the bottom line and "how to pull more out of that."
Diablo 3, on the other hand, wasn't affected by that, he said.
"We were very solidly a premium box model, but a lot of the talk about Immortal before I left ... was all Activision Blizzard. They wanted a free-to-play Diablo really badly, and I didn’t," Wilson shared. "Granted by then I was off Diablo."
The designer also added that Activision had a great effect on all business models and that he thinks a lot of the higher-ups who left did so because they got frustrated with all of that.
He also added that there was a saying at Blizzard: ‘we always want to be the guys in the white hats'”, which means they always wanted to be the good guys, do something that is right for the players.
"If we charge our players for something (of course we’re going to charge them – we’re a business), ... we always wanted to charge them what we thought was reasonable. That came in direct conflict [with Activision]."
Diablo Immortal is a successful game as it has generated over $100 million in global spending. However, it's widely known among players for its microtransactions policy.
Watch the full presentation here and don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
Keep reading
You may find these articles interesting