The video game industry is a many-layered thing, and that’s fine because that’s how it should be. But above all else, the industry, especially those who make the video games, should be about balance. They need to balance how many people are in their dev teams. They need to balance how much they put into a video game and what it costs them. They need to balance their subject matter to ensure it meets their desired target audience, etc. Just as important, they need to balance quality so gamers aren’t angry, which the Blizzard President has certain feelings about.
During a recent talk with The Verge, the President of Blizzard, Mike Ybarra, stated that the company tries to do the best with its games but that gamers “have no patience:”
“Players have no patience. They want new stuff every day, every hour. We’re trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high.”
That’s a bold statement, but he kept going when he said:
“We know players want new content literally almost every single day. At the same time, it takes large teams to be able to deliver that. So you have to monetise it in the right 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 world where we know that’s always going to be the basis of what we’re doing?’”
He also stated that finding the right “balance” is something they’re striving for:
“I think we’re still fine-tuning a lot of those things as we go forward. But it’s something top of mind for me as we go forward.”
So yeah, he said quite a bit, but does it mean anything? Gamers can indeed be very impatient, but to say that they want new content “every single day” is a bit much. After all, sometimes gamers get new content, and it takes more than a day to beat, so that’s not accurate to state.
Plus, true gamers KNOW that making quality titles and content takes time, and they want things done right the first time.
It’s curious that Blizzard says these things after all the mistakes they’ve made with their MMORPG in recent years or after making a certain mobile title that no one wanted that was nothing more than a cash grab, and so on. Some could easily interpret this as deflecting blame.
