Xbox management paid a visit to Blizzard’s offices in Irvine California this week.
As reported by Windows Central, the Xbox team comprised Phil Spencer himself, Sarah Bond, and Matt Booty, among others. Several staff from both companies shared photos of the visit, including Lulu-Cheng Meservey, Sarah Bond, and Mike Ybarra.
Interestingly enough, when Xbox head Phil Spencer finally addressed Blizzard’s staff, he said he had ‘no answers today.’ Instead, Xbox would follow the lead of their studios on what they would like to do next.
As Lulu described it, this event was Blizzard’s formal onboarding, which is corporate speak for the start of their integration to Microsoft. They were oriented on their new parent company, including learning about Microsoft’s structure, culture, vision mission, etc. This is the start of a process that Phil stated could take as long as two years. It is also worth noting that Xbox visited Blizzard before Activision’s and King’s parent offices, as well as their other major studios located elsewhere.
That may have been a deliberate choice on the part of the Xbox team. Blizzard is a big studio with a lot of blockbuster games, but also one fraught with a lot of internal issues. A cloud of sexual misconduct allegations has been surrounding the company for the better part of four years, meeting up with the two year timeline of Microsoft’s plan to acquire it.
Part of the reason Microsoft received support for their acquisition of Activision Blizzard King was that it would be a change of management for these employees, many of whom pointed at outgoing CEO Bobby Kotick and other higher ups of covering up those misconduct claims. Microsoft will also have to deal with the ongoing lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, but organizations like the Communications Workers of America were promised a labor neutrality agreement if this deal pushed through.
Outside of this, of course, Microsoft is planning out how to best utilize their investment. While they had revealed their big bet to bring Blizzard games to mobile on their own third party app store, they will obviously also want to optimize the popularity and profitability of the games that are already on PC and consoles.
That hopefully means fixing all the issues Blizzard is facing with Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, and World of Warcraft, that remain unresolved in light of these issues. We can only hope that they can effect real and permanent change.
