Blizzard Entertainment has bought out Proletariat, developers of Spellbreak, to help with WoW development

In an intriguing move, Blizzard have brought 100 staff from indie developer Proletariat on board to help with World of Warcraft development.

In an unprecedented move for recent times, Blizzard Entertainment – the World of Warcraft half of Activision Blizzard’s larger multi-studio ensemble – has announced the complete purchase of another studio, Proletariat, to bolster its development team. The vast majority of Proletariat’s new work will be on World of Warcraft, supporting the creation of Dragonflight, the upcoming expansion, as well as future content.

While Activision Blizzard as a larger entity has moved studios around and integrated them into Blizzard, as well as made acquisitions over the years, Blizzard itself has done so extraordinarily rarely. This is the first time since 2005, before Blizzard were even part of Activision and a vastly different economic landscape for Blizzard and the industry as a whole.

Proletariat will be shutting down its own game, Spellbreak, which failed to ever reach “exit velocity” for user acquisition according to an interview with VentureBeat. It has been working with Blizzard since May and will be fully integrated over the coming months, though employees will be continuing to work in Boston if they aren’t remote, rather than moving the studio to California. Blizzard representatives say this means the studio has many more hiring opportunities with offices on both coasts.

It’s an intriguing move from a studio that has had endless struggles over the past two years – COVID, lawsuits, talent moving on, firing rounds, game issues and much more has contributed to the lowest reputation Blizzard has had in some years. It is of note that Blizzard recently closed various international offices, most notably its Versailles, Paris office that served the European sector.

However, those offices did not do development work, and weren’t based in the United States, instead focusing on customer service, PR, and marketing. These endeavours were mostly moved to outside contractors.

Blizzard says that the deal started discussion in December, with more serious conversations being held in the past few months. This would line up with when the Microsoft acquisition started to come down the pipe, given its announcement in January, likely giving some additional financial freedom to Blizzard.

Written by GLHF.