The president of Blizzard, Johanna Faries, has said that the company is in a position to deliver “reliable cadences of launches.”
Speaking to Bloomberg, the executive said that its audience would like to have a big launch or two a year, and the games giant’s boss believes that it can meet this demand.
“We have iconic IP and in many ways it still has a lot of room to scale, so let’s focus in on the cards we have to play,” Faries explained.
“It doesn’t mean we won’t go into new places and territories, but for right now, let’s home in on all the iconic stature that we have in the tank for Blizzard. That’s number one.
“I’d say the other piece on vision is: I believe our best days are ahead of us. I really, truly believe that. I also believe that we are in a position to think about delivering reliable cadences of launches. Our fans are hungry. They want to get involved. They want to feel reliability as well. They want us to have a sense of what’s right around the corner. Let’s look at it as a portfolio, and let’s make sure that every — let’s say calendar year — there are at least one to two really big things that Blizzard is pumping out. And if we can configure our slate accordingly, which we believe we have done, we’ll be able to stay top of mind, leveraging the multi-franchise opportunities that we have.”
Pressed as to how Faries wants Blizzard to balance live games and new projects, the executive admits that this is a challenge and one that requires a great deal of logistics.
“There are three guiding lights in my head: There’s the people aspect of our organisation, there’s the products we put out and there’s the planning,” she said.
“This isn’t as exciting on paper, but planning allows us to think both immediate term, what’s going on tonight — here comes the Paladin — and also where are we with Diablo four years from now? And how do we put the right meetings and discussions and talent in place to be able to run it, to be able to run in parallel? Credit to the teams, who have leaned in so well to that way of working. I believe if you were to ask really any head of franchise right now, or teams on the franchises, ‘Hey, do you know where this is going to be three years from now?’ They do. And I think we’re pretty excited. And then the difficult conversations are: If we’ve got live games, what are you doing? How do you cadence that? How do you manage those different models? What models do we want to continue to espouse, ramp up, ramp down?”
Faries joined Blizzard as president in January 2024 having previously led the Call of Duty franchise as its general manager. The studio’s recent releases have been expansions for venerable MMO World of Warcraft and Diablo IV, the latter being its most recent standalone release in 2023. The company released free-to-play mobile title Warcraft Rumble the same year, but the title was wound down this summer alongside staff layoffs.
