Blizzard Acquires Proletariat (Spellbreak) to Strengthen World of Warcraft Team

After Vicarious Visions who joined blizzard ranks for the needs of Diablo II: Resurrectedit is the turn of another studio to be absorbed by the Irvine firm, reports Dean Takahashi for GamesBeat. This time it’s about Proletariatan independent studio of around a hundred people, head of spellbreak… which will therefore soon close its doors.

Behind this acquisition, Blizzard bluntly indicates that it will be a question of strengthening the World of Warcraft development teamleave to participate in Dragonflight production, still planned for this year. For the President of Blizzard Mike Ybarra and the head of WoW John Hightthis should prevent the MMO finds itself without content too long after the release of Dragonflightthen allowing more sustained production. This aspect was particularly lacking in Shadowlandsparticipating in the disenchantment of players with the previous extension.

We put gamers at the forefront of everything we do, and we work hard to meet and exceed their expectations. A big part of supporting our teams is making sure we have the resources to produce experiences our communities will love while giving our teams the space to explore even more creative opportunities within their projects. Proletariat is the perfect solution to support Blizzard’s mission to bring high-quality content to our players more often.

Obviously, Proletariat was reluctant to of an acquisition at first, but the mixed commercial success of Spellbreak partly pushed Seth Sivak and his team to accept the deal. On the other hand, beyond job security of his Boston-based employees, the CEO wanted to make sure that Blizzard’s corporate culture so decried for a long time, to the point of creating a small scandal last summer, be compatible with the convictions of Proletariat.

The massive turnover that resulted from it is surely no stranger to Blizzard’s need to recruit large numbers of staff, but according to SivakBlizzard provided enough items to be convincing:

• We had a very open and transparent conversation about this, and I think the Blizzard team recognized some of the challenges they encountered. In some of the early conversations, we discussed how they plan to continue to improve the culture and continue to create a great place to work for developers.
• It was encouraging. Clearly, there’s a lot of work to be done to continue creating a great place for developers. But we were quite happy and satisfied with the direction the teams are taking.

Founded in 2012 by veterans from from Insomniac, Harmonix and TurbineEntertainmentProletariat will therefore disappear in the bowels of Blizzard. Seth Sivak and his team are very excited about creating content for World of Warcraftdescribing gamers’ appetites as “voracious,” but that didn’t stop studio members from having a twinge of heartbreak at the idea of ​​giving up Spellbreaklaunched in the tumult of 2020 after a long gestation.

Unfortunately, this seemed inevitable: the Battle Royale where AK-47s were traded for powerful spells to master has not been updated since September 2021. The free-to-play took advantage good reviews and of a certain success of esteembut the market is tough, and player base is not important enough to Spellbreak can have a sustainable future.

Spellbreak was a critical success, and we felt like we really delivered something new in the Battle Royale genre. There is a lot of competition in this arena, where you compete against some of the biggest games in the world. We just couldn’t get the release velocity needed to keep expanding.

Spellbreak players however, still have a few months to enjoy the magical Battle Royale before shutting down servers which is not expected before early 2023.