It’s no secret that while this is a great year for new games, 2023 has been a really bad year for the gaming industry for various reasons. Thousands of employees across nearly every game publishing and creating company/studio have seen layoffs. Even the two major gaming engines on which 99% of all games are made (Unity and Unreal Engine) have been a part of these layoffs. Activision Blizzard is no exception, from retiring of the Overwatch 2 competitive scene to reductions in various game development teams, over two percent of their staff of Activision Blizzard’s workforce has been experienced layoffs this year (a little over 200 people). Couple this with Blizzcon 2023 is the first time this event has not sold out and it is looking pretty bad. While this is small in the grand scheme of Blizzard, it can still have an impact on the quality of content that Blizzard games put out. We saw this across a few of their games in 2023, namely Diablo IV, Overwatch 2, and to a lesser extent, World of Warcraft and Call of Duty.
Despite these layoffs and subsequent setbacks in their games, Activision Blizzard is set to have a pretty big recovery in the fourth quarter of 2023 and into 2024. There are several reasons for this but the biggest one is Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard for over $69 billion, which was just given the go ahead by the British government after antitrust concerns. While acquisitions can turn out bad for companies being acquired, this probably won’t be the case for this big of an acquisition. Adding that much money to Activision Blizzard’s budget will likely allow for the games that didn’t do so well in 2023 to recover in 2024. The full acquisition will probably take many more months, this is the biggest tell-tale sign of a potential recovery. There are also some other signs of a recovery for Activision Blizzard within their games.
World of Warcraft (WOW), one of the most popular MMOs for the last 20 years, has been releasing new content on all three of their versions – Classic WOW, Classic Wrath of the Lich King WOW, and retail Dragonflight WOW. With Classic WOW, hardcore classic was released about a month ago and brought back hundreds of thousands of players to the game. Classic Wrath of the Lich King just released its final raid Ice Crown Citadel, which is widely regarded as the best raid ever in WOW. Finally, Dragonflight just recently announced the next raid major update and raid of the expansion, which is slated to be released on November 7th. Big changes to classes, new mythic+ dungeons, and an all-new raid will come with it. Players are also predicting this to be the last major update of Dragonflight and if it is, it would mean the 10th WOW expansion would likely be released in Summer of 2024. All these updates to all WOW versions are huge for the franchise and could spell a promising future for WOW.
Diablo IV, what could have been the best game release of 2023 if not for its meteoric fall from grace with consecutive terrible updates, is also showing signs of a comeback. Season two of Diablo IV just released on October 17th and reverted some of the terrible changes that were made in season one, bringing back some of the many players it lost. It also added some content to the monotonous endgame so there is a little more variety, as well as added higher drop rates for rare items like Legendaries, Uniques, and uber Uniques. While there is still a long way to go in redeeming Diablo IV, this is a good start.
Lastly, there is also Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 coming out on November 8th. Modern Warfare has always been a fan favor for any COD games, so this will also help in the Activision Blizzard’s comeback. Outside of these three games, there are not many other games to look at for Blizzard. The rest of their games are either stagnating or on the decline. That being said, there is a unnamed survival game in the pipeline, which could be released in 2024, and that would be another boon Activision Blizzard’s game library. Looping back to the Microsoft acquisition though, there are any number of new game projects that could come out of that. We will just have to see and all we can do is hope that this once great gaming company can regain its former glory.
