Blizzard Acquires Spellbreak Developer Proletariat To Work On World Of Warcraft

gameinformer.com:

Yesterday, Spellbreak developer Proletariat released a blog post detailing the future of its spell-based battle royale that launched years ago. In it, the studio revealed that the servers for Spellbreak will shut down in early 2023, effectively ending the run of this battle royale. 

This shutdown likely had to do with the game’s low player count. Still, there might be more to it than that: Blizzard Entertainment, the studio behind franchises like Overwatch and Warcraft, is acquiring Proletariat and using its force of roughly 100 employees to staff up its World of Warcraft team, according to a new report from GamesBeat. 

“We are putting players at the forefront of everything we do, and we are working hard to both meet and exceed their expectations,” Blizzard president Mike Ybarra told the publication in a statement. “A big part of caring for our teams is making sure we have the resources to produce experiences our communities will love while giving our teams space to explore even more creative opportunities within their projects. Proletariat is a perfect fit for supporting Blizzard’s mission in bringing high-quality content to our players more often.” 

This news comes just months before the launch of the newest World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight, which you can read more about here. As noted by GamesBeat, this acquisition is one of the largest in recent memory for Blizzard. This purchase means that the Proletariat team will be under the Microsoft-Xbox umbrella soon following the completion of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

According to the GamesBeat report, the purpose of this acquisition is to beef up World of Warcraft staff numbers so “that it can hit quality and timing goals for expansions.”