Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Spellbreak development studio Proletariat Inc! As reported by VentureBeat, the hundred plus person studio is being absorbed into Blizzard specifically to bolster the World of Warcraft development team and reduce the downtime between content updates
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That’s a nice argument, Senator Greasy. Why you don’t back it up with a Source?
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And here’s the link: https://venturebeat.com/2022/06/29/blizzard-acquires-spellbreak-studio-proletariat-to-bolster-world-of-warcraft/
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In order to ensure the security and continuing stability of the game, World of Warcraft will be reorganized in the Final Fiantasy XV game.
For a safe and secure playstyle! "
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reminds me of my first job. Big provider bought a smaller company to aquire the knowledge and manpower and then more than 50% of the employees left the company before the merge even happend lol.
If you cant hire the people you buy it. We will see how it goes.
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So that’s how they fixed it.
There have been hundreds of job openings to join the WoW team for like half a year and the positions are not filling. Blizzard is no longer the be all and end all to have on your CV so they’ve probably had to raise wage offerings by a ton, and even then they couldn’t get anybody.
So they just buy out a different studio.
My guess is that they think they’re buying 100 developers, but soon enough they’ll find out they’re actually getting 50 because half of them will leave. That’s always how it goes.
I continue to be concerned with the things John Hight is saying as well. He seems to be utterly confused. His direction has turned straight from toxic and dismissive of the community all the way to “idk let’s do what the players say”.
So he gets a bunch of experienced MMO devs that have created 3 MMO’s between them all of which had some success but got completely obliterated by WoW, and it seems like their approach is that they want their help in making content, not their help with systems design.
And then they tell us that the team is growing but the content production is falling. Heh, well… maybe something else is wrong. Legion clearly used something like SAFe, maybe look at that again?
Well, at least Blizzard seems to be looking backwards at the moment. That’s a start.
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It’s going to take time to integrate a big external team into the WoW, and it’s not going to possible to immediately give the new guys strategic responsibilities like systems game design, especially not so close to the completion of Dragonflight.
I’m interested in hearing about how these new guys settle in and how they contribute to WoW. Hopefully they’ll bring fresh new ideas and make the game better. With this many new people, Blizz might be able to make improvements to parts of WoW that need help, such as PvP.
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Does this mean spellbreak stuff in wow? 
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Between this acquisition, the Vicarious Visions acquisition, and the various Asian studios that Blizzard outsources tasks to, the company is the diametrical opposite of what it was in the early 2000’s after it closed Blizzard North with the intent of consolidating everyone to Irvine.
This certainly provides them with more avenues to acquire more employees, which I suppose is the number 1 priority. It does also imply that Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine is no longer the talent magnet that it used to be, which is certainly food for thought.
I guess for WoW players it’s certainly reassuring to see that Blizzard also recognizes that the content cadence for Shadowlands was a disaster and that they’re taking steps to prevent a similar disaster with Dragonflight.
But I’ll have to see it before I believe it. It may be Mike Ybarra’s big focus area, that Blizzard needs to push more content out to its players more frequently, but Blizzard are infamous for being the slowest snail in the entire industry when it comes to developing content to completion. And part of it is that the company’s success and quality has historically revolved around design iteration – which takes time, lots of it.
So it’s great that they get more people, but if the culture is still that the Senior Artist can’t implement a new transmogrification set before it has been reviewed by the Art Director, Game Director, Lead Narrative Designer, Lead Producer, and Bob from the canteen who just walked by, and they all have a million changes they want made to it because they want to feel clever and underscore the culture of iteration, so the damn thing ends up taking 10x as long to get approved as otherwise, only for it to have a blue-grey color tone instead of a navy-blue color tone, then more people won’t make any difference.
And I have a feeling that that’s what’s going on too much. Every time they do interviews or Q&As it’s always about them discussing it internally. At Blizzard they are experts at discussing things internally, but they’re amateurs at making decisions and empowering individuals.
The production team has certainly been eaten up by borrowed powers, which on their own are content.
As for SAFe, if they do the same as in my current job then it won’t help them pumping out content they’d instead create dependencies to following sprints (I’ve witnessed that, it was funny)
as long as blizzard is a terrible place to work they can buy all the studios they want people will just quit once again ab shows their complete lack of understanding of the problem with not getting fresh blood because no one wants to work with a vile little goblin as Ceo and a board of enablers not to mention the awful reputation blizzard has now
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Sounds cool. I never heard of Spellbreak or Proletariat, but more devs and less downtime is good.
We can always wish! 
but it is most likely that they just have to execute orders from the “main” teams.
Well, I’m not going to disagree with this, but if I may: I think there are some people in there who know rather a lot about creating the exact kinds of things WoW is currently missing, and they should not be ignored. I fear they will be.
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To me it seems that since Mike Ybarra and Morgan Day got promoted, the WoW team is way more receptive and appreciative to critical feedback than in the past. So hopefully the new guys won’t be ignored.
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Some of those will take their skills elsewhere, mergers/takeovers typically have employees take voluntary redundancies, straight out quit or find work elsewhere if they don’t like situation.
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Judging by the article the team from Proletariat have been working alongside the Blizz WoW team since May. I wonder if it is their integration into the team that has allowed for the optimistic release schedule for DF by the end of the year.
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I would hold your horses about claims that half of proletariat will leave. They have 4 games, 3 are dead and shut down, last one is shutting down soon.
Working on world of warcraft is actually upgrade for those devs.
not really if you work in a company that has a good positive work environment and come to blizzard its a massive downgrade can’t be productive if your constantly fearing your superiors being abusive scumbags
You are wrong about this. They are coming in as a studio. It means they still work as a team they used to, with the same CEO.
If you acquire a studio, it doesnt mean that all the members of the studio take their laptops and go sit into a blizzard office. Becuase you are buying a studio, not hiring extra devs.