Blizzard Acquires Spellbreak Developer Proletariat for World of Warcraft Team

Thats only good we will see in around 2 years if it has any noticable effect on the game.

B team expansion when

Sounds like a potentially good acquisition with the caveat that it might also just turn out to ruin a promising smaller developer.
Still, no reason to be overly pessimistic or optimistic - change is afoot at Blizzard.

Let's hope they don't waste the good parts in trying to eliminate the bad parts - the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that hasn't made Diablo any better.

Do they even have a successful game to their name?

Originally Posted by loras

Sounds like a potentially good acquisition with the caveat that it might also just turn out to ruin a promising smaller developer.
Still, no reason to be overly pessimistic or optimistic - change is afoot at Blizzard.

Let's hope they don't waste the good parts in trying to eliminate the bad parts - the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that hasn't made Diablo any better.

The "promising smaller developer" release their game, ghosted their community and then abruptly announced that they were shutting down their game after 6 months of no announcements if the community is to be believed.

Originally Posted by bmjclark

The "promising smaller developer" release their game, ghosted their community and then abruptly announced that they were shutting down their game after 6 months of no announcements if the community is to be believed.

The community is rarely ever to be believed, though frankly i'm less interested in community management (Blizzard has plenty of experience in that department even now) than i am in them making conceptually interesting games.

And let's be honest now: Though communities get upset when a game is not given further attention, the mark of a finished game is that it neither needs nor gets further attention. Perhaps not too bad an influence for Blizzard in the present, where only their final patches resembles something of a finished product nowadays.

Originally Posted by loras

The community is rarely ever to be believed, though frankly i'm less interested in community management (Blizzard has plenty of experience in that department even now) than i am in them making conceptually interesting games.

And let's be honest now: Though communities get upset when a game is not given further attention, the mark of a finished game is that it neither needs nor gets further attention. Perhaps not too bad an influence for Blizzard in the present, where only their final patches resembles something of a finished product nowadays.

None of their games are single player stories. They were all live service shit. Even their own website shows them putting out a patch last year then dead silence until the announcement yesterday they were shutting it down and being bought.
https://www.proletariat.com/about-us

They claim to be about players first but keep making live service stuff that they abandon. Not sure that's the type of people I want working on WoW.

Actiblizz owning the Proletariat. how symbolic

Originally Posted by qwerty123456

None of their games are single player stories. They were all live service shit. Even their own website shows them putting out a patch last year then dead silence until the announcement yesterday they were shutting it down and being bought.
https://www.proletariat.com/about-us

They claim to be about players first but keep making live service stuff that they abandon. Not sure that's the type of people I want working on WoW.

I would see your point if WoW had not always been about live-server stuff. ^^'
As for the rest, if they sold their stuff but made it unplayable without services they no longer provide, yeah that's going to cause them a lot of trouble for good reason, assuming anyone has the balls to actually pursue such practices in a jurisdiction with any common sense.

I said it on the other thread that's floating around.

Who?

Originally Posted by loras

I would see your point if WoW had not always been about live-server stuff. ^^'
As for the rest, if they sold their stuff but made it unplayable without services they no longer provide, yeah that's going to cause them a lot of trouble for good reason, assuming anyone has the balls to actually pursue such practices in a jurisdiction with any common sense.

Originally Posted by Snorlax

An MMO is literally the definition of a live service game. It's the original live service genre.

I'm not saying that the live service part is bad. What I'm saying they make all their games live service and stop supporting them. A live service game needs support unlike a single player offline game. Live service ends when the service ends. If they made a single player game and tossed out a couple patches then abandoned the game it would be fine cause you can still properly play the game.

sure hope they're not affected in any way in the graphics department... Spellbreak looks like generic unity game #9666, and I fear wow will slowly become generic too if they're not careful

Putting aside Proletariat's prior reputation and achievements, this sort of move has been done before by Blizz... and the result was WoD. If we assume all these people are going to be a boon to Blizz, the immediate impact of this acquisition is still going to be negative. This is because the new people have to get acclimated to WoW and how Blizz operates, and the experienced devs and personnel will have to sacrifice their own time to do this. I've seen people heralding that this will ensure Dragonflight will be amazing, but the reality is likely the opposite. Best case scenario the status quo with the expansion doesn't change as the new devs are going to the second team.

This move is more of a long-term effort that may or may not pay off. The ultimate problem is that the root of many issues with the game aren't even acknowledged by the current devs, so don't expect newbies to be the ones to make them turn a new leaf. While Blizz could pump out more content faster for WoW, the game philosophy itself needs to change. If you want sort of analogy, imagine a boat that's taking on water: adding more people to grab buckets to scoop out the water will certainly help to some degree, but if your captain doesn't order the cause of the leaks to be fixed you're just maintaining a broken boat and wasting manpower in the long term.

Sorry, what game?

Blizzard, the company that is so bad people don't want to work for them.

So, what do they do? They buy out a whole ass studio and consume them, forcing those who worked there to now work for Blizzard instead.

Originally Posted by DeltrusDisc

Sorry, what game?

If you ask someone who knows the game, they will tell you is "good", "charming" and "one of a kind".
Is a Battleroyal based on magic.

To the usual MMO-C user...you might call it "dead game"...because is kinda dead (i hear).

But was innovative for its time, IMO

Originally Posted by SinR

I said it on the other thread that's floating around.

Who?

This, you just don't need to explain it if you know anything.

Not much of a PvPer but it would be really neat if they made some type of battle royale mode in WoW. Gear is irrelevant. Kill mobs to gain some power ups. Stage shrinks over time forcing people into 1 spot. Last man standing wins.


Perhaps use their random generation tech so it randomly creates PvP zones similar to island expeditions but much larger to fit 40+ players.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by sephrinx

Blizzard, the company that is so bad people don't want to work for them.

So, what do they do? They buy out a whole ass studio and consume them, forcing those who worked there to now work for Blizzard instead.

People dont want to work there, lol. Your need to stop drinking the blizzardsucks flavored kool-aid. Your drunk.

The Spellbreak team not long ago announced they are shutting down the game next year
I guess they going "all in" on Blizzard from now on.

Spellbreak was the first game ever released fully cross-platform with cross play on day one across PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch.

Is not a bad game at all...but...saw very little support from developers after release...probably a consequence of not making very much money.

A Video made yesterday about it:

Originally Posted by exochaft

Putting aside Proletariat's prior reputation and achievements, this sort of move has been done before by Blizz... and the result was WoD. If we assume all these people are going to be a boon to Blizz, the immediate impact of this acquisition is still going to be negative. This is because the new people have to get acclimated to WoW and how Blizz operates, and the experienced devs and personnel will have to sacrifice their own time to do this. I've seen people heralding that this will ensure Dragonflight will be amazing, but the reality is likely the opposite. Best case scenario the status quo with the expansion doesn't change as the new devs are going to the second team.

This move is more of a long-term effort that may or may not pay off. The ultimate problem is that the root of many issues with the game aren't even acknowledged by the current devs, so don't expect newbies to be the ones to make them turn a new leaf. While Blizz could pump out more content faster for WoW, the game philosophy itself needs to change. If you want sort of analogy, imagine a boat that's taking on water: adding more people to grab buckets to scoop out the water will certainly help to some degree, but if your captain doesn't order the cause of the leaks to be fixed you're just maintaining a broken boat and wasting manpower in the long term.

WoD suffered from massive layoffs during the alpha and complete zone rewrites as far as Beta. Nothing to do with acquiring a new studio.

Also, WoD had probably one of the strongest box games to ever release for an expansion, and fell apart with the lack of follow-up content post-launch (due to said reasons above).