After Blizzard: The Big New AAA-to-Indie Exodus Is in Full Swing

ign.com:

At this year’s Summer Game Fest a new indie developer called Frost Giant Studios revealed its debut game, Stormgate, to the world. If you saw the cinematic trailer and thought, ‘Hey, that looks a bit like StarCraft’, then it will come as no surprise that Frost Giant is a studio largely made up of ex-Blizzard developers; a collection of people who stepped away from one of the most prolific studios in history to forge their own path.

On its own, that story of AAA-to-indie is somewhat commonplace in the games industry today. But Frost Giant is just one part of a bigger, separate picture. Over the past few years, dozens of people have departed Blizzard in pursuit of new dreams. Hearthstone director Ben Brode set up Second Dinner, and has just released superhero card game Marvel Snap. Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo artist Glenn Rane stepped away to become a co-founder of Lightforge Games. Even Blizzard’s ex-president himself, Mike Morhaime, left the company he helped create to start Dreamhaven, a developer made up of two studios – Moonshot and Secret Door – and staffed by Blizzard alumni. It’s clear that, within the next few years, we’re going to see an explosion of games developed by Blizzard veterans who aren’t at Blizzard anymore.

We first explored these talent departures last year. Blizzard is at a crossroads; a multi-year dry period has seen its franchises slow down or become stagnant, and development teams have struggled in their pursuit of innovation. The ongoing nature of the developer’s games also means staff may work on the same project for over a decade, which can understandably lead to burnout. The result of this combination of factors was perhaps inevitably always going to be an exodus, but rarely does such an