Blizzard acquires Spellbreak studio Proletariat to bolster World of Warcraft

Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Spellbreak creator Proletariat to bolster the staff of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

Under the deal, Boston-based Proletariat will become part of Blizzard, and the team of 100 will begin work on World of Warcraft, including the Dragonflight expansion coming later this year. Spellbreak, a battle royale game where wizards and witches succumbed to each other, will be sunset. (The company announced the news yesterday.)

The move is the largest acquisition Blizzard has made — at least in the past decade — to expand its studios. In this case, the mission is to bolster the workforce for World of Warcraft so it can meet expansion quality and timing goals. The terms of this transaction have not been disclosed.

Activision Blizzard, Blizzard’s parent company, also folded Vicarious Visions, a longtime Activision studio, into Blizzard to start working on the Diablo franchise in January 2021. But Blizzard wasn’t particularly greedy, as one of the few we can remember being the acquisition of Swinging Ape in 2005. Instead, Blizzard itself was thrown around quite a bit in its early days before landing with Activision Blizzard in 2008. It proletariat has been collaborating with Blizzard since May.

“We put players at the forefront of everything we do, and we work hard to meet and
exceed their expectations,” said Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard Entertainment, in a statement. “A big part of caring for our teams is making sure we have the resources to create experiences our communities will love, while “We give our teams the space to explore even more creative possibilities within their projects. Proletariat is perfectly suited to support Blizzard’s mission to bring quality content to our players more often.”

It’s a tricky time for Blizzard to do this, as parent company Activision Blizzard is currently being acquired by Microsoft for $68.5 billion. And Blizzard Entertainment was the primary division under investigation by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in a major sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Activision Blizzard.

Dealing with past challenges

John Hight, general manager of World of Warcraft at Blizzard, said in an interview with GamesBeat that supporting Shadowlands was a challenge last year, acknowledging that there were significant gaps between updates to WoW content. Fans always wanted more, and even though the team kept getting bigger, it was hard to hire people.

I asked Seth Sivak, CEO of Proletariat, if the company was hesitant about the deal due to Blizzard’s weakening reputation, which has taken a beating in recent years. I mentioned the investigation into sexual discrimination, the criticism of the Shadowlands expansion, the departure of many well-known developers, and other loss of talent.

“We’ve had a very open and transparent conversation about this,” Sivak said. “And I think the Blizzard team recognized some of the challenges they’ve had. In some of the early conversations, we discussed how they wanted to keep improving the culture and making a great place for developers to work.”

He added: “That was encouraging. Obviously there is still a lot of work to do to continue to make it a great place for developers. But we were quite happy and satisfied with the direction the teams are heading.”

Hight said it was “devastating” for him to go through the turmoil of the past year and hear the things that have happened. But he noted that the company is changing its culture and that is not yet a fact.

He said, ‘You have to change your culture. You need to make it more inclusive in our workplace now. You have to make sure that the people who make WoW and the people who play WoW are well supported.”

As for the Microsoft deal, Sivak said he wasn’t sure what change would result, but he’s excited about the direction the company is heading. When asked if the company would be working on new games, Sivak said the focus for now is on helping build WoW. Hight said the goal was to gain access not only to the talented team, but also to a senior leadership team with a lot of experience.

How the deal came about

“As you probably know, people in World of Warcraft have a voracious appetite for content,” Hight said. “And what we’ve seen over the past year is that we need to increase the amount of content we can create, and the frequency with which we put it into the hands of our players.”

Towards the end of last year, the company started looking for other opportunities besides hiring more people in the in-house studio. It was looking for external partners and Proletariat was shortlisted because it was a well-known game studio.

“My first conversation with Seth was in December,” Hight said. “I was really impressed with him. And then the team felt that he had a lot of shared values ​​and a lot of knowledge about World of Warcraft. The team had the ability to create stylized art, what we do, and work with medieval fantasy, which we love. And they had a lot of fans. So from them followed our discussions.”

Sivak said the company was also looking at what to do next. He said the team saw the opportunity to evolve as a studio and that working on World of Warcraft would fulfill the mission of delivering great multiplayer games. In recent months they have started talking more seriously.

“The opportunity to expand the world of Azeroth for the players made us very excited,” said Sivak.

Hight said the consolidation in the industry presents Blizzard with some exciting opportunities, as it now has studios working on WoW on both coasts, with the potential to tap into new sources of talent. Of course, in some ways the pandemic has made it more difficult to hire people, and the proletariat is not yet working in the Boston office. Blizzard itself has options, including working in the office at times.

Hight noted that the company has delivered multiple extensions with a remote workforce and that the company has options for a hybrid environment.

“That’s one of the things that made this decision easy for us to start working with Proletariat, as they have a large number of remote employees,” Hight said.

Sivak said: “When we looked at what the next chapter would be for the proletariat, this opportunity only meant that we could speed up what we wanted to do. It’s really great to be able to work for the World of Warcraft audience. And the level of ambition where I think both teams want to reach World of Warcraft is incredibly exciting for us. †

Hight said some of Proletariat’s work will appear in the Dragonflight expansion. And the Proletariat will increase its workforce in Boston.

Proletariat was founded in 2012 by industry veterans of Insomniac, Harmonix and Turbine. The team has experience building MMORPGs and includes former chief designers of Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online. At Proletariat, the team has been managing live games for nearly a decade, most recently the cross-platform action-spellcasting battle royale game, Spellbreak, coming out in the fall of 2020.

But Sivak acknowledged that while the game received good reviews, it never hit an “escape speed” in terms of scaling up the number of users to justify its continued existence. The company had made relatively few updates to the game lately.

“Spellbreak was a critical success, and we felt like we really delivered something new in the battle royale genre,” said Sivak. “There’s a lot of competition in that area where you have to compete with some of the biggest games in the world. We just couldn’t get the escape velocity needed to expand it further.”

The proletariat began cooperating with the World of Warcraft development team in May and will be complete
integrated into Blizzard Entertainment in the coming months.

“The really exciting part is what we’re going to build in the future,” Sivak said. “That was the real selling point for us, the level of ambition for what we want to do with World of Warcraft.”