Former Blizzard President planned to 'cut back' on microtransactions and reboot Overwatch in Diablo 4 before the Microsoft purchase

If Microsoft had not paid $69 billion for Activision Blizzard in 2017, we might have seen some dramatic changes made to Diablo 4 or Overwatch. Jason Schreier, the author of Play Nice: Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, reports that former Blizzard President Mike Ybarra had planned to reduce microtransactions in Diablo 4 and restart Overwatch before he left.

Details about how this would have been done are not given, and it is possible that only Ybarra was aware of the plan, but his departure prevented it from coming to fruition. I think it would have been a difficult task to argue against a cosmetic shop that earned the company reportedly over $150 million in revenue. I don't think an Overwatch 2 reboot would have been well received by players who had already invested so much money and time into Overwatch 2.

Ybarra was not popular with Blizzard's employees, as Schreier's biography reveals, ever since he became president in 2021. He angered them during an all hands meeting in February 2023 when he announced that Blizzard would no longer allow remote work after years. His plans to "pivot from the live service" model would have probably gone over well among Blizzard's fans, but what would it mean for the developers to have to work to accomplish this?

Diablo 4's cosmetics are more affordable than those in Diablo 3. I don't think removing them all would do much other than reduce the number people who complain about the shop on Reddit. It would be a real win to remove the shop and expand the number of armor transmogs available in the game. But that would require a lot of work from the development team.
I'd be happy to play an Overwatch without the microtransactions. It seems like this is something that would not even require a reboot. The fact that the idea existed in Ybarra’s head makes me wonder if a growing feeling was felt internally that wrapping up games in a live-service model wasn't possible. We won't know the details of any of this unless Ybarra takes time to comment while running his sports company PrizePicks, which is not a gambling company.