Blizzard Entertainment is planning to acquire Proletariat, the developer behind Spellbreak, a battle-royale wizard shooter. The company revealed yesterday that the game is set to shut down early 2023, and today, VentureBeat reported that Blizzard is seeking to expand its development teams with this purchase.
Proletariat’s 100 employees will be joining Blizzard Entertainment, specifically its World of Warcraft team, to assist with Dragonflight. While this isn’t great news for fans of Spellbreak, at least the team has secured work.
What this acquisition could mean for WoW
The entirety of Proletariat’s staff being moved to work on WoW: Dragonflight isn’t something to scoff at. Considering World of Warcraft’s team is reported to be anywhere from 100-300 people according to a GameInformer interview with Allen Adham, increasing that number by an extra hundred is huge. This change could suggest many positive outcomes, but lets set some expectations before going off the hopeful deep end.
That many people could work as a support team to iron out bugs or polish up the content that’s already there. At the very least, it’s unlikely that a team increase of this size would be detrimental. However, what’s more likely is that the members that make up Proletariat’s current staff will continue working on the things they were doing with Spellbreak.
Designers continue designing, concept artists continue illustrating, and coders keep coding. Best case scenario: this staff increase could result in larger expansions, especially after Shadowlands suffered a noticeable content drought. It only received two post-launch raids and one dungeon, making its final size comparable to Warlords of Draenor, which was notorious for its lack of content.
World of Warcraft relies on its post-launch content coming with semi-frequency to breathe life in the game. If a team expansion such as this can guarantee one more major patch every expansion, then it’ll certainly be worth it. Perhaps we’ll even see expansions get larger than even Legion was, offering over a dozen dungeons and more than five raids over the course of its lifetime. But beyond that, I hope that an increase in team size like this results in higher-quality content.
