Former president of Blizzard Mike Ybarra has entered the phase of being a videogame executive that involves, among a lot of things, some very unfiltered posting on social media. Like arguing with other CEOs over New Years, or telling people they need to “man up” over AI use.
Anyway, World of Warcraft: Midnight had a really rough patch, recently, and given his understandable investment as the former captain of the ship, Ybarra has taken to his X account (thanks, GamesRadar+) to comment on the state of the game once more:
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As someone who has been keeping track of WoW, I am going to take a moment to quibble, here—”reset” is a big word, and not necessarily even what’s in order. The baseline offerings of Midnight are good. Player Housing was a great success, the new Prey system has a lot of promise, its raids and dungeons are all solid and interesting, its zones are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There’s a lot to like!
The issue is that the train’s moving so fast the wheels are threatening to come off of the dang thing. I actually wrote about it this weekend—while I wouldn’t call the game perfect, the problem isn’t with the MMO itself, it’s with Blizzard outpacing its own quality control. Either the developer needs to slow down, or it needs to get a better handle on proactive bug fixes.
But “reset” implies a bigger scrapping and starting over—and trust me, compared to WoW’s lowest low-points? We don’t have it nearly as bad as we did back then. Need I remind anybody that this is an MMO that used to have 400+ day patch droughts.
But he was also present for Shadowlands, one of the game’s most disastrous expansions, and he also oversaw the $68.4 billion acquisition of Blizzard that resulted in 1,900 employees laid off across Activision-Blizzard.
While I wouldn’t put much stock in the argument that follows—it’s a slapfight on X—Ybarra does respond to some criticism over his tenure and where it led Blizzard: “You’d have to blow the team completely up to course correct. We did what we could under the circumstances, but clearly did not succeed.”
Anyway, I’m not convinced that Blizzard needs a complete overhaul. There’s a lot of work to do and good will to scrape back, but one bad patch doesn’t make a dying MMO—I mean, unless you’re Star Wars: Galaxies. Bugs can be fixed, and Midnight’s not going to sink the ship just because of one sketchy update.
Is the studio at risk if it doesn’t turn things around in the next few major patches? Sure. But we’re seeing signs of ill health, not a game on life support, and WoW’s a stubborn old beast. If it can make it through Shadowlands without exploding, I’m pretty sure a buggy patch ain’t gonna do it.
