Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, who stepped down back in January, has a new job: CEO of PrizePicks, a daily fantasy sports company.
In 2021, Ybarra was appointed co-head of Blizzard alongside Jen Oneal. The pair replaced J Allen Brack, who resigned following the California civil rights lawsuit. A few months later, Oneal announced that she was leaving Blizzard, and Ybarra became the studio’s sole head until this year, when he unexpectedly quit shortly after the Microsoft acquisition went through. Former Call of Duty general manager Johanna Faries is now Blizzard president.
Ybarra announced his resignation at the same time that Microsoft laid off almost 2,000 of its gaming employees, including an entire team at Blizzard that had been making a survival game. He provided little explanation, saying only that it was “time” for him to go. According to reporter Jason Schreier, Ybarra had previously said that they’d have to “drag” him away from Blizzard.
Ybarra’s new job doesn’t give us any obvious clues about what really happened between him and Blizzard and Microsoft. His old job is only briefly mentioned in the press release, and he generically comments that “PrizePicks is the most exciting company in sports entertainment today.”
Ybarra’s leap from PC games to daily fantasy sports is suggestive, though. Recent videogame industry innovations like loot boxes, battle passes, daily quests, and rotating shop selections certainly feel like they’d be at home in the daily fantasy and gambling worlds, and the ideas exchange surely goes both ways.
Daily fantasy sports emerged in the 2010s due to what’s arguably a loophole in US law: Bans on sports betting don’t necessarily bar fantasy sports leagues with cash prizes—they’re considered games of skill—and there’s no rule that the leagues have to last all season. In apps like DraftKings and PrizePicks, players pay to enter contests in which they select rosters of athletes competing that day, winning cash prizes if their picks perform well. Chance is of course a much greater factor when picking players daily, as opposed to managing a fantasy team across a whole season.
A related development is the rise of mobile gaming platforms, such as Skillz, that offer cash prizes for directly competing in small-scale gaming competitions. (Skillz calls them “casual mobile gaming tournaments,” but if you’re putting money down on solitaire, I’d argue that you’re not really a casual solitaire player.)