It’s been rough going in the game development world, and it’s getting rougher: Microsoft has laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard staff. Layoffs are an expected reality after corporate mergers, and certainly the industry trend is towards cutting staff this past year. But this… also cuts a bit deeper.

The changes announced today reflect a focus on products and strategies that hold the most promise for Blizzard’s future growth, as well as identified areas of overlap across Blizzard and Microsoft Gaming. Today’s actions affect multiple teams within Blizzard, including development teams, shared service organizations and corporate functions. As part of this focus, Blizzard is ending development on its survival game project and will be shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development. 

There’s some irony in Blizzard’s abandonment of the survival game project just as Palworld is eating the genre’s lunch – copying existing games and making them slightly better was Blizzard’s whole M.O! No doubt the layoffs were planned months ago, but part of me wonders whether the calculus would have changed had they known of Palworld’s viral success. Then again, if Blizzard released something to less acclaim, then that would be pretty embarrassing.

I’m actually low-key devastated that we won’t see Blizzard’s take on the genre. It may seem like there are a lot of options available – and there are – but it’s quite rare to see AAA development in this space. Right now, it’s like… Fallout 76 and maybe Grounded. No Man’s Sky might count? Just imagine your character running around with the detail of Overwatch rigs. Blizzard already has experience building giant, seamless worlds too. Although… hmm. If you squint hard and ignore the questing, I guess WoW itself really might feel like a survival game already. Maybe that slight overlap was the problem.

In any case, another unfortunate outcome of the axed survival game is the fact that the devs working on it were pulled from other areas months ago, only to be laid off. From a Hearthstone Reddit thread:

—FORMER Hearthstone Devs that were on cancelled Survival Game have been laid off!:

-Matt London – Designed Book of Mercenaries (solo adventures/stories/characters), Twist, and Caverns of Time Expansion

-Ates Bayrak – Designed Duels

—Current Hearthstone Team members laid off:

Cynthia Park – Hearthstone PR Manager

On second thought: oof. Book of Mercenaries was not good content, Twist has been an epic disappointment, and Caverns of Time was an insane cash-grab that’s especially egregious considering they “paused” Twist for months. Meanwhile, Duels is was… cut from the same cloth, let’s say. I don’t want to kick anyone while they’re down or anything, but I’m starting to wonder if Blizzard was really assembling an A-Team for the survival project. Maybe these devs were the ones most willing to take risks to see what works. And perhaps the monetization strategy wasn’t their idea. Who knows?

Oh well. Pour one out for the game that was not to be.