Blizzard Entertainment’s survival recreation, which it informally introduced in 2022, was reportedly canceled over engine points throughout its six years of growth, in keeping with a brand new Bloomberg report. This report follows yesterday’s information that Microsoft is shedding 1,900 staff throughout its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax divisions. Alongside this information, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra additionally introduced he was departing from the corporate, and we realized the aforementioned survival recreation had been canceled.
However, Blizzard did not actually contact on why the sport it had simply introduced precisely two years prior was canceled. Bloomberg’s new report particulars growth struggles across the recreation’s engine, which was prototyped utilizing Epic Games’ Unreal Engine earlier than “Blizzard executives decided to switch, in part, because it wouldn’t support their ambitions for vast maps supporting up to 100 players at once.”
The staff behind this recreation, which Bloomberg says was known as Odyssey, switched to Synapse, an in-house engine Blizzard initially developed for cell video games and (*6*)
This reportedly led to important issues in Odyssey’s growth. When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard final 12 months for a colossal $69 billion, the staff had apparently hoped their new house owners would enable it to modify again to Unreal Engine. However, that swap did not occur.
Bloomberg notes that regardless of engine struggles, the sport’s growth made progress, with individuals who performed early variations of it having fun with it, remarking on its potential in a panorama the place survival video games are as well-liked as they’re. Just this week, Early Access ‘Pokémon With Guns” survival recreation Palworld crossed 8 million copies bought on Steam in simply six days, and people numbers do not embrace gamers taking part in via Xbox and PC Game Pass.
Blizzard was reportedly trying to develop the Odyssey staff in an effort to focus on a 2026 launch 12 months for the survival recreation, however Bloomberg studies “even that seemed overly optimistic to some developers.” And now, as we formally know, growth has concluded and the as soon as thrilling Blizzard recreation canceled.
Be certain to learn the total Bloomberg report for much more particulars.
For extra, examine Microsoft’s heartbreaking layoffs from yesterday, which have left 1,900 individuals jobless. At simply 26 days into 2024, there have been greater than 5,500 layoffs, which is greater than half of the entire layoffs of 2023.
[Source: Bloomberg]
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