Spellbreak Shutting Down Next Year As Developers Acquired By Blizzard

The Protelariat’s interesting take on the battle royale genre, Spellbreak, will shut down in early 2023.

“We are grateful to everyone in the game’s community for exploring the magical worlds and experiences we created together,” the official statement reads on the official website. “Spellbreak was an ambitious project that saw our team push new boundaries in design and development and we are excited to continue to innovate as we create new titles in the future.”

On a separate post on Reddit, CEO of Protelariat Seth Sivak gives out a more honest reason why the promising battle royale game has to be shut down:

“Unfortunately, the game industry is a difficult business. Spellbreak was not able to break through and reach a sustainable place where we could continue to invest in it in the way we had dreamed of. We picked a hard path as an independent studio and decided to compete with some of the biggest games in the world. While we could not get the escape velocity needed, I do not regret the bold decisions we made in bringing Spellbreak to life.”

The game launched in 2018 and features a robust magical elemental system unseen in other battle royale games, which at the time were only focused on guns and gunplay. The game amassed over 10 million players over the years, and featured cross-play and cross-platform saves on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch.

What’s next for the Protelariat? Apparently, the team has been acquired by Blizzard to join the development team working on the ongoing MMORPG World Of Warcraft.

The Protelariat was founded by various industry veterans with experience working on titles like Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. So there is some sense as to why Blizzard is acquiring the company based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

In fact, Protelariat was already working with the World Of Warcraft team as early as last May before the acquisition even closed. But now that it has, the Proletariat team will be integrating into Blizzard.

“We are proud to be working with Proletariat as we further expand our development team and build towards welcoming more players into the Warcraft universe,” said John Hight, general manager of the Warcraft franchise.

“We’ve been listening to our community and making great changes to World of Warcraft based on their feedback- bringing the talented Proletariat team into the fold allows us to explore even more ways we can surprise and delight players who call Azeroth home.”

This is the second development studio Blizzard has absorbed an established development team in recent years, with the previous being the merge of Vicarious Visions– previously under Activision and part of the Activision-Blizzard group already- into Blizzard.