Blizzard buys studio behind Spellbreak to support World of Warcraft

Blizzard Entertainment has acquired the Boston-based studio Proletariat. This is the company behind battleroyalegame Spellbreak. The acquisition is intended to deploy additional manpower to support World of Warcraft.

In a interview with VentureBeat Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak confirms the acquisition, but the acquisition amount remains unclear. The 100 employees of Proletariat will be deployed as additional manpower for the development of World of Warcraft. They will contribute in part to the Dragonflight expansion, which will be released for World of Warcraft later this year. The number of Proletariat employees will also be expanded.

Proletariat will be integrated into Blizzard in the coming months, but that will probably not have direct consequences for the studio’s employees. Until now, they still mostly work from home. John Hight, the general manager of World of Warcraft, says that this large group of remote developers actually made the purchase decision easier, because several extensions have already been made for World of Warcraft with mainly developers working from home.

Founded in 2012 by veterans of Turbine, Harmonix, and Insomniac, the studio Proletariat began collaborating with the World of Warcraft development team as early as May. Now that the studio becomes part of Blizzard, it is from the beginning of 2023 end of exercise for Spellbreak† “Spellbreak was a critical success factor and we felt like we really delivered something new in the battleroyal genre,” says 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.”