Blizzard's focus is on existing properties, president Johanna Faries says: 'We have iconic IP and in many ways it still has a lot of room to scale'

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 05: Johanna Faries attends TheWrap Presents Power Women Summit at The Maybourne Beverly Hills on December 05, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Araya Doheny/Getty Images) — (Image credit: Getty Images)

After almost three years as general manager of Call of Duty, Johanna Faries became president of Blizzard in 2014, replacing the outgoing Mike Ybarra. Under her tenure, Blizzard struck a new deal with NetEase, undoing a bitter breakup and reopening the lucrative Chinese market.

Talking to Bloomberg as her second anniversary as president approaches, Faries displays an executive's gift for saying jargon-rich nothings about "IP" and "mindshare" and "leveraging", but does give a slight insight into the company's future plans—which are to focus on existing settings rather than new ones.

Faries says the plan is to ensure there are at least one or two major Blizzard releases every year. "Let's look at it as a portfolio," she says, "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."

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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