After rushing to Phil Spencer’s defense for criticizing Microsoft following the layoffs at Bethesda, the former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra publishes a long speech on social media where he proposes solutions to the crisis that the Redmond house and, more generally, the gaming industry is going through.
Just over three months after Mike Ybarra’s farewell to Blizzard Entertainment, the now former president of the Irvine company decides to once again address the issue linked to the closure of the Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin and other Bethesda companies by writing an open letter addressed to the community and, indirectly, to Microsoft management itself.
In the long post published on Twitter/X, the former Blizzard boss starts from the assumption that “The Xbox team has always been responsible for its own business. Even when it was a small division, or in the red, there was always pressure and this will continue to be there in the future. I read articles and posts from people who believe that behind these In fact, there is a sort of ‘Council’ that makes decisions. But even if there were, it is certainly not the job of this ‘Council’ to dictate the agenda to the teams on what to develop and how to plan Xbox’s strategy. I have never seen Satya Nadella give peremptory orders from above: Sure, he asks questions but gives full power to his teams, he’s a fantastic leader. Then there is the idea that behind all this there is the problem of a ‘market that isn’t growing’, but that’s a PR excuse. As a leader, it’s your job to drive your team’s growth even if the overall market isn’t growing at the pace you expect.”.
While believing that the strategies of a company like Microsoft can change depending on market trends, Mike Ybarra says he is certain that the real secret of success, for the Xbox division as for any other company in the sector, is determined by “need to create great video games. If you make great games, demand will grow and your business will benefit even in years of low market growth. The big video games are the real profit generators, with revenues that can even reach over a billion dollars. But there are other factors to consider such as size of your development studiosthe ability to launch video games at the right pace or the installed base. It is not necessary for your studios to develop only very high budget video games, in fact, it is even not recommended given the risks involved in following only the triple A route. If therefore you are not developing excellent games at the right pace, then your hardware isn’t selling and your subscription isn’t growing as it should, so there has to be a broken step in the decision-making and management chain. But Microsoft has teams that can develop incredible video games. Simply, at present this developmental capacity is not expressed coherently“.
The former Blizzard boss then refers to Sarah Bond’s latest statements on the future of Call of Duty ‘free’ on Xbox Game Pass with all Activision games and explains that “If your North Star is Game Pass, then you really need to make it a necessary part of your services, hardware and gaming strategy. For sure the regular entry of games rated above 90 out of 100 into Game Pass can be the perfect gateway to success. That said, there is no doubt that it is still a come on strategy risks as high as the potential benefits, a path that must be taken only if you have a strong desire to win. But if you don’t have this goal, then you might as well become a pure publisher and embrace cross-platform publishing 100%, otherwise you condemn your hardware to inexorable failure because people would no longer feel the need for it. For Microsoft, being the largest video game publisher in the world is already a great starting point, but if it decided to go the pure publisher route it would still have to create great video games.”.
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