Blizzard Makes Huge Acquisition That Will Help The “Voracious” Demands Of WoW Players

Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment is acquir­ing Pro­le­tari­at, a stu­dio cen­tered in Boston, which will work on World of War­craft mov­ing for­ward. This is to help meet the “vora­cious appetite” play­ers have for new con­tent. Of course, this is all hap­pen­ing while Bliz­zard itself is being pur­chased by Microsoft.

The deal was first revealed to Ven­ture­Beat, where it’s learned that Pro­le­tari­at’s 100 devel­op­ers will con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of WoW, includ­ing the Drag­on­flight expan­sion that’s sup­posed to be out this year. Pro­le­tari­at’s lat­est title, Spell­break, is shut­ter­ing for good.

Pro­le­tari­at’s acqui­si­tion is just the lat­est stu­dio expan­sion for Bliz­zard, as the Activi­sion stu­dio Vic­ar­i­ous Visions was recent­ly brought into the Bliz­zard group to help with the Dia­blo series.

Gen­er­al man­ag­er of WoW, John Hight, gave a state­ment regard­ing the acquisition. 

“As you prob­a­bly are aware, folks in World of War­craft have a vora­cious appetite for con­tent,” Hight stat­ed. “And what we’ve seen over the last year is that we need to increase the amount of con­tent that we can cre­ate, and the fre­quen­cy with which we’re putting it in the hands of our players.”

Bliz­zard, and par­ent com­pa­ny Activi­sion Bliz­zard, has been in the news for quite some time over reports of sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion, as well as oth­er cor­po­rate prob­lems. Pro­le­tari­at CEO Seth Sivak said the team had a very kind and open and trans­par­ent con­ver­sa­tion” about these issues before the acqui­si­tion was agreed upon.

“In some of the ear­li­est con­ver­sa­tions, we dis­cussed just how they were look­ing at con­tin­u­ing to improve the cul­ture and con­tin­u­ing to make a great place for devel­op­ers to work,” he said. “That was encour­ag­ing. Obvi­ous­ly, there is a lot of work to be done to con­tin­ue to make an awe­some place for devel­op­ers to work. But we were pret­ty hap­py and sat­is­fied with the direc­tion that teams are going.”