Blizzard buys Studio Proletariat to work in World of Warcraft

Blizzard will acquire the studio Proletariat responsible for games like Spellbreak to work on the World of Warcraft IP in the future.

(Feature photo credit: Blizzard)

We learned yesterday in a blog post that Proletariat, the Boston studio behind Spellbreak, will be shutting down their servers in early 2023, thus ending their game. This battle royale where players fight each other with magical spells has been launched in 2020 and will only end after 3 years. This decision is likely related to the rather low number of active players, but it may also be related to Blizzard’s acquisition of the studio.

(Image credit: Proletariat)

Blizzard, responsible for successful franchises like World of Warcraft or Overwatch, acquired the studio and wanted to use nearly 100 employees to expand the team working on World of Warcraft. These employees will help, among other things, work on the new Dragonflight expansion That should hit this year.

The opportunity to expand the Azeroth realm for players really got us excited.» Seth Sivak, CEO of Proletariat.

Good news for World of Warcraft fans

This acquisition is the biggest employee entry at Blizzard in a long time. A major decision that appears to have been made in order to meet the expected deadlines and quality of the new World of Warcraft extension. John Hyet also mentioned in an interview with Games Beat that developing content for the franchise became more difficult with the team in place, as was finding new employees to work on.

We put players at the forefront of everything we do, and work hard to meet and exceed their expectations. Proletariat is the perfect solution to support Blizzard’s mission to deliver quality content to our players often.» Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard.

Thus, this acquisition means that the Proletariat team will soon be part of the large Microsoft-Xbox family. However, it will be necessary to wait until the purchase of Activision Blizzard by the latter is completed.