Blizzard will acquire the Proletariat studio, responsible for games like Spellbreak, to work on the World of Warcraft IP in the future.
(Feature image credit: Blizzard)
We learned yesterday in a blog post that Proletariat, the Boston studio behind Spellbreak, will close its servers in early 2023, thus ending their game. This battle royale where players fight each other with magic spells had done its release in 2020 and will end only 3 years later. This decision is probably linked to the number of active players which is rather low, but perhaps also linked to the acquisition of the studio by Blizzard.
(Image credit: Proletariat)
Blizzard, responsible for successful franchises such as World of Warcraft or Overwatch, acquired the studio and wanted to use its approximately 100 employees to expand the team working on World of Warcraft. These employees will help, among other things, to work on the new extension Dragonflight which should arrive this year.
The opportunity to expand the world of Azeroth for players really excited us.» Seth Sivak, PDG de Proletariat.
Good news for World of Warcraft fans
This takeover is the biggest employee entry at Blizzard in quite a while. A major decision that seems to have been taken in order to meet the deadlines and the quality expected for the new extension of World of Warcraft. John Hight also mentioned earlier in an interview with Games Beat that developing content for the franchise was becoming more and more difficult with the team present, as was finding new staff to work on it.
We put players at the forefront of everything we do, and we work hard to meet and exceed their expectations. Proletariat is the perfect solution to support Blizzard’s mission to bring high-quality content to our players more often.» Mike Ybarra, President of Blizzard.
This acquisition therefore means that the Proletariat team will soon be part of the big Microsoft-Xbox family. However, it will be necessary to wait until the purchase of Activision Blizzard by the latter is completed.
