Draugoth
Gold Member
In the final chapter of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, author Jason Schreier reports that former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra "had planned to cut down on microtransactions in Diablo 4 and reboot Overwatch," before he left the studio.
Ybarra, as detailed in Schreier's book, was unpopular with Blizzard employees ever since he was appointed president in 2021. He angered many of them during an all-hands meeting in February 2023 about Blizzard's mandated return to office after years of allowing remote work. His plans to "pivot away from the live service model" would've probably gone over well with Blizzard fans, but who knows what it would've meant for the developers having to do the work to accomplish that.
Of the two games, Diablo 4 seems much less egregious with its paid shop cosmetics. I don't know what removing a bunch of them would really do other than maybe reduce the number of people who sit on Reddit fuming that the shop exists at all. A real win would be to remove it entirely and expand the amount of armor transmogs in the game, but that would no doubt take loads of work by the development team.
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