Blizzard Entertainment wants to acquire its first new studio in over 15 years.
In a report from VentureBeat, the company said it intends to acquire Proletariat the Boston-based dev team. As a result, Proletariat’s flagship game, Spellbreak – a battle royale where you cast spells at your enemies instead of bullets, will be shut down.
“After more than four years of elemental spells and spell combinations, we have decided to end development of Spellbreak ,” the company wrote on its website. “The servers will be closed in early 2023”.
Proletariat was founded in 2012 and launched its first game, World Zombination, on mobile devices in 2015. In addition to developing traditional games, Proletariat has also been working on creating games built into Twitch that would allow viewers to interact and play with. their favorite streamers.
Spellbreak, launched in 2020, was Proletariat’s attempt to enter the already crowded world of Fortnite-style third-person Battle Royale. The game was a lot of fun at launch, it only took a few minutes to learn, and it took very little communication to make the teams work.
Despite this, Seth Sivak, CEO of Proletariat, revealed in a post on Reddit (which accompanies the announcement of the upcoming closure of the game) that Spellbreak is far from being a financial success . “Spellbreak hasn’t been able to explode in popularity and reach a level of revenue that would have allowed us to continue investing in him in the way we had dreamed of .”
Proletariat will join the Blizzard and Microsoft families given the pending mega acquisition that is expected to end next year. According to VentureBeat, the Proletariat staff will switch to the World of Warcraft team as Blizzard needs more manpower for the production of the Dragonflight expansion: the two studios have been working together since May.
Blizzard President Mike Ybarra said in a statement, “A key part of our culture is caring for our teams, making sure we have the resources to produce experiences our communities will appreciate, while giving our teams the space to explore even more creative opportunities within their projects. Proletariat will be the perfect solution to support Blizzard’s mission to bring more high-quality content to our players ”.
