In a day and age where studios are bought out on a seemingly weekly basis, one of the industry’s biggest hitters, Blizzard, has gotten in on the act today having announced that they are acquiring Spellbreak developer Proletariat. The acquisition comes at an interesting time, considering that only yesterday Proletariat had announced that their work on Spellbreak was going to be coming to an end with the game’s servers set to be shut down in early 2023. Blizzard’s intent for the team following the completion of the acquisition is to enlist the team’s services in fuelling the fires of the World of Warcraft beast.
Proletariat has over 100 developers on its books and each of them will soon be turning their attention to World of Warcraft and the upcoming Dragonflight expansion that is due to arrive later this year. Of course Blizzard, as a part of Activision will itself soon (pending the full process of its own acquisition playing out smoothly) will soon be on the books of Microsoft following Microsoft’s announcement in January that it intends to buy Activision-Blizzard-King and add it to the Xbox family of studios in 2023. As it happens, Proletariat has been working with Blizzard since May, and it was perhaps a successful working relationship here that prompted the discussion of acquisition.
Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard Entertainment, said in a statement “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.”
World of WarCraft: Dragonflight is due to launch later this year, and Proletariat’s experience on other MMORPG’s such as Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online, is bound to be of benefit to Blizzard.
