Out for Spellbreak: Blizzard buys and commits Studio for World of Warcraft

Blizzard wants to buy Proletariat, the development studio responsible for Battle Royale Spellbreak. The title will be retired early next year, and staff will instead be working on World of Warcraft from now on. It’s the biggest acquisition by Blizzard developers in the last decade.

Spellbreak ends after just over two years

Spellbreak breaks the monotony of Battle Royale first-person shooter with a top-of-the-line fantasy setting and magic-based gameplay. When it was released in September 2020, players greeted the title as a breath of fresh air, but lately the free-to-play game has been experiencing low and low player numbers. In the past few months, Spellbreak has only had a few hundred concurrent players on Steam, such as The star of the game in order to SteamDB Notes.

At the beginning of 2023, the game must now be eliminated, among other things, like the proletariat Advertise by entering a blog. As expected, the shrinking society is disappointed and angry.

Blizzard buys a studio to work in World of Warcraft

The outrage is also directed against Blizzard, as the takeover must be another reason for the end of the Battle Royale title. Perhaps as many as 100 game developers in the Boston-based studio have been working with colleagues at Blizzard since May 2022, as in the beginning VentureBeat mentioned. According to this, Proletariat should already be involved in World of Warcraft’s ninth expansion, Dragonflight, which is expected this year – there seems to be no time to keep another game.

VentureBeat Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak asked how he felt about the continuing reports of sexual harassment and discrimination scandals and Blizzard’s lost reputation. However, he denied this and referred to the ongoing investigation into the scandals. Blizzard on the right track.

We had a kind of open and transparent conversation about it. And I think the Blizzard team recognized some of the challenges they faced. In some early conversations, we just discussed how they were looking at continuing to improve the culture and continuing to provide a great place for developers to work. That was encouraging. There is clearly a lot of work to be done to continue providing a great place for software developers to work. But we were very happy and satisfied with the direction they are going.

Seth Sivak, CEO of Proletariat

In the coming months, the studio will be fully integrated into Blizzard as the acquisition process completes. It’s the largest developer studio acquisition by Blizzard in the past decade. Most recently, publisher Vicarious Visions, responsible for Tony Hawk’s Pro Scater 1 & 2 and editor of the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, bought studio toys for Bob in May 2021. Activision Blizzard itself is still in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, which has been It was announced earlier this year.