Blizzard President Johanna Faries discusses the future of video games with Conan O’Brien

One of the most unique featured sessions at SXSW this year was Claiming the Future of Entertainment, a chat between Blizzard Entertainment President Johanna Faries and noted silly person Conan O’Brien. The conversation covered various topics on the theme of adapting to changing landscapes in media, content delivery, audience interactivity, and more across gaming, television, and entertainment in general. It’s worth watching, but here are some highlights.

While both O’Brien and Faries are currently fairly well-known names in the gaming world, neither had a very direct path there. Faries spent over a decade at the NFL in various business roles before moving to Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty Esports team. Over the past five years she continued to move up the CoD ranks until she was named Blizzard’s President in 2024.

While Faries has always been a gamer, Conan broke onto the scene much later in his career. Though best known for his late night talk shows and chart-topping podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, he did not catch the video game bug at a young age. Just over a decade ago he began trying out and reviewing games as someone who had no skill or knowledge on his Clueless Gamer segments. These shorts continued on after the end of his late night shows, and he grew a significant new gaming-centric fanbase who enjoyed his honest and irreverent commentary on the latest releases.

There are a few of Conan’s classic nonsense moments throughout the session, including when he requests to be placed into Diablo 4 as a demon and when he accepts a ceremonial Doomhammer from Faries and jokes, “what a huge waste of resources.” The most interesting takeaway for me was their discussion in the middle of the program about how video games as a genre could continue to experience the growth and diversification they have seen over the decades and become the driving force in entertainment writ large.

The relevant section starts at about the 20-minute mark. Conan describes his initial skepticism of video games as the future of entertainment, but then admits that seeing how the interactivity and player-driven stories have developed has caused him to reevaluate his thinking. Faries gives several examples of how gaming has gone from a dismissed and misunderstood genre to becoming normalized and popular.

While I did grow up playing video games (starting before I could even read), it was never hard for me to recognize the change in how they are perceived first-hand over the years. When Conan made his late night debut in late 1993, gamers may have been playing Starfox, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or Doom. Blizzard (then known as Silicon & Synapse) got its start that very year with Rock ‘n Roll Racing, their first internally developed release, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, would follow the next year. People who enjoyed video games were a narrow slice of the population.

Three decades later, almost everyone I know spends at least some of their time gaming. The huge diversification of genres and the sheer number of titles has created a world where there’s a game for everyone. You’re likely to find a frantic family-wide Overcooked game underway if you visit my in-laws. My dad recently retired and dug out his old Wii to play some Wii Sports Resort. My oldest offspring is currently tearing her way through Kanto with an incredibly overpowered Pikachu and little else, and I couldn’t be prouder.

With the rapid and explosive growth of computing power, video games today can reach a quality and depth that developers in the 1990s would probably call unrealistic science fiction. You may be reading this article on a device that fits in your pocket, which you can also use to fire up a video game in less than five seconds. Video games have an inherent ability to meet people’s specific entertainment needs. Someone who is looking to turn off their brain and relax after a long day at work will play a different type of game than someone who is craving a mental challenge.

On the Blizzard Watch podcast earlier this month, Matt Rossi talked about the ill-fated 1982 release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 and how the video game industry nearly collapsed as a result. Right now it really seems like we’re at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum — gaming is so widespread and diverse that it could very well continue growing until it becomes an even more dominant force in entertainment that it is today.