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Back in 2022, Blizzard announced that they were working on a survival game set in an “all-new universe”. Not much more was known about the game except that the studio were actively ramping up recruitment, seemingly after having been working on the project since 2017.
This survival game has now been cancelled alongside today’s news of sweeping layoffs across Blizzard and other divisions of new owner Microsoft.
“Today’s actions affect multiple teams within Blizzard, including development teams, shared service organizations and corporate functions,” said head of Xbox Studios, Matt Booty, in a note to staff reported by The Verge. “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.”
At the time of its original reveal, Blizzard shared two pieces of concept art from the game which showed characters in plain clothes seemingly stumbling across a portal to a fantasy world. Now-departing head of Blizzard Mike Ybarra said that the had “played many hours of this project”, while LinkedIn updates from Blizzard staff later suggested its five-year development period.
Game projects get cancelled before release all the time, but we hear about more cancellations now because developers are announcing projects much earlier to help with the recruitment of experienced staff.
Earlier today Microsoft laid off nearly 2000 people across Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and Xbox teams. This follows 10,000 layoffs made across the tech giant in January last year, which included staff at several Microsoft game studios.