Magic-infused battle royale Spellbreak is going to be shutting down in early 2023, as reports emerge that developer Proletariat will now help beef up the World of Warcraft team and will, it’s planned, be acquired by Blizzard.
Spellbreak launched in 2020, joining the crowd of games jumping aboard the free-to-play battle royale craze, however it infused the gameplay with spectacular magical spells instead of relying on guns found in the likes of Apex Legends, Fortnite, PUBG and COD Warzone. This allowed the game to feature different elemental magics and classes.
However, while the game saw millions of people checking it out close to launch and enjoyed some notable peaks of interest on Twitch, the player base seemingly hasn’t kept up. SteamDB’s activity tracker suggests that there’s just a few hundred players on PC via Steam at any one time, though that figure would be in the thousands when factoring PlayStation, Xbox and Switch players.
Ultimately, it seems that Proletariat joining Blizzard will be a marriage of convenience as the studio of around 100 will join the team working on the new Dragonflight expansion that’s coming later this year. The details of any deal have not been made, but Venture Beat’s reporting suggests that Proletariat will start working on WoW now and be absorbed into Blizzard in the coming months.
It’s another major addition to Blizzard Entertainment’s pool of developers, which has endured some turmoil over the last few years (and not just because of the workplace allegations and lawsuits). After the rushed release of Warcraft 3: Reforged, Team 1 that focussed on real time strategy games was reportedly disbanded, and the studio then needed someone else to take over the development of Diablo II Resurrected, drafting in Activision studio Vicarious Visions to help. Vicarious Visions has now been fully made a part of Blizzard and is working on Diablo, with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 remakes were cancelled because of this.
Source: Proletariat, Venture Beat, SteamDB
