Blizzard Is Buying a Game Studio to Work on World of Warcraft
Blizzard needed more people to work on World of Warcraft, but instead of a recruitment drive, the company decided to acquire an entire game studio's worth of talent and experience.
As VentureBeat reports(Opens in a new window), althought the deail isn't finalized yet, Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat(Opens in a new window). The Boston-based studio was founded in 2012 by game-industry veterans from Harmonix, Turbine, and Insomniac. Game releases over the past decade include StreamLegends, Streamline, World Zombination, and most recently Spellbreak.
Now the whole team (around 100 people) is expected to become a part of Blizzard and focus on World of Warcraft development for the foreseeable future. According to Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard Entertainment, "Proletariat is a perfect fit for supporting Blizzard’s mission in bringing high-quality content to our players more often."
It should come as no surprise Proletariat announced yesterday that Spellbreak development is ending(Opens in a new window) and the servers will be shut down in early 2023. But you never know, the multiplayer battle royale action-spellcasting game could make a return in the future as a Blizzard game. Although, if the Microsoft acquisition is successful, Spellbreak will end up being a Microsoft-owned gaming IP.
The next World of Warcraft expansion, called Dragonflight, is now available to pre-purchase in a range of editions and will be released before the end of 2022. Blizzard is also set to launch a World of Warcraft mobile game soon. Proletariat is going to be tasked with Dragonflight work assuming the deal is finalized, and Blizzard expects the studio's team in Boston to increase in size after that.
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