blizzard Blizzard Entertainment Acquires Spellbreak Development Studio Proletariat

[Staff 1,388]

Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Spellbreak Development Studio Proletariat to beef up the staff on World of Warcraft. Its team of 100 people will start working on WoW, including the Dragonflight expansion coming later this year, according to Venture Beat.

President of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Ybarra said in a statement that "Proletariat were a perfect fit for supporting Blizzard's mission in bringing high-quality content to the players more often."

"We are putting players at the forefront of everything we do, and we are working hard to both meet and exceed their expectations." "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.” Mike Ybarra President of Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft General Manager John Hight commented that they "need to increase the frequency at which they deliver WoW updates" and that "Proletariat were an easy decision, as they have a large remote work force."

“As you probably are aware, folks in World of Warcraft have a voracious appetite for content and what we’ve seen over the last year is that we need to increase the amount of content that we can create, and the frequency with which we’re putting it in the hands of our players.” “That’s one of the things that made this decision easy for us to start working with Proletariat, as they have a large remote work force". John Hight General Manager of World of Warcraft

In response to the acqusition, the Spellbreak Development team posted an update on the future of their battle-royale game Spellbreak,

Spellbreak's development will end and servers will go offline in early 2023, as Proletariat will be fully integrated into Blizzard Entertainment in the coming months.

Breakers, After more than four years of elemental magic and spell combinations, we’ve made the decision to end development of Spellbreak. The servers will be shut down as of early 2023. Thank you to the millions of players who have joined us in the Hollow Lands since 2018; it’s been an amazing journey. Our vision was to create a fresh, multiplayer action-spellcasting game with exceptional movement and class customization that would give players the chance to unleash their inner battlemage. We are grateful to everyone in the game’s community for exploring the magical worlds and experiences we created together. Spellbreak was an ambitious project that saw our team push new boundaries in design and development and we are excited to continue to innovate as we create new titles in the future. To all Spellbreak fans around the world, thank you for the support and dedication that made the game and community so special. Sincerely,  Spellbreak Development Team

Blizzard Entertainment hasn't yet provided a statement on the acquisition.

Source: Venture Beat

[Prophet001 547]

Pretty exciting for WoW imo.

[Pregrowth 46]

Not gonna lie, pretty exciting news

[Q 140]

Hopefully, this will mean good things for WoW. However, I am still skeptical over the release date of DF and various other factors of the gameplay loop of current WoW such as M+ overshadowing raids for gearing as the only items from the raid anyone really cares about are the tier sets and maybe a trinket or weapon with a specific effect and I don't believe the Proletariat team will have much influence over these factors, if any at all.

[Arcling 887]

Name "Proletariat" can potentially be both ironic and non-ironic in this situation.

[Frogspoison 63]

Made 4 games total. All games except their current were online-only, and have been shut down. Little bit I could tell was that they were heavy on the microtransactions. Overall seems to be a more of a "slap it out then move on" kinda development company. Expect to see more of the exact same *filtered* that we've been seeing for nearly the past decade now.

[Ragingwolf 287]

This raises an eybrow for concern imo.  Blizzard has layed off more employees during the time of BFA and SL and now absorbing another small company of 100 people to work on projects that are oriented to WoW.  Not to mention a rush date to get things going for DF that is supposedly to release later this year if not the next year.  If not under a specific type of work contract I would urge these new employees to have a back up plan of employement if Blizzard should do a repeat of layoffs.

[Osrig 0]

I do not see much sense in shortening the intervalls of patches! It's like the race between hare and hedgehog! Blizz can do, what they want and produce content for endgame in WoW as fast as possible, but there will be always those who cry for more content! Content, content, content!

It would be an impossible task to satisfy them, but worse, Blizz may discourage all those players, who have the usual tempo of getting along in the game. If Blizz would create more content for parts in the game made for lower levels or older zones in Azeroth, things may be different, though!