Microsoft cancels Blizzards new game which has been 6 years in development

[bongowongo]

Video-game maker Blizzard Entertainment canceled one of its biggest projects on Thursday as part of a reorganization under new owner Microsoft Corp. that led to mass layoffs of 1,900 people, or 8% of the gaming division’s total staff. The cancelation of the game, codenamed Odyssey, left Blizzard employees reeling as some lost their jobs and others were left wondering about the future of the studio.

Microsoft announced the news in an email to employees early Thursday morning, and many members of the Odyssey team were subsequently informed that they were being let go. The news arrived three months after Microsoft closed the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in the largest video-game deal in history.

Odyssey started in 2017 as a pitch from Craig Amai, a Blizzard veteran who worked on World of Warcraft. It was conceived as a survival game, like Minecraft and Rust, but with more polish and fewer bugs. In subsequent years, the team working on the game expanded, and it was announced publicly in 2022 as the company began hiring more staff.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...8cGUHT8Kgg-ETg





Brutal.

[BraneyGumble]

6 years of "development" with 100+ devs and nothing to show for it.

Yeah, good riddance. But maybe they'll reuse the assets for another game like did for Overwatch after they cancelled Titan.

[PumkinPie]

I was like oh **** what was it, then read survival game like rust. And nothing of value of lost.

[ispy]

6 years of "development" with 100+ devs and nothing to show for it.

Yeah, good riddance. But maybe they'll reuse the assets for another game like did for Overwatch after they cancelled Titan.

they were probably milking the company for money while dragging their feet. look at how much time they spent on d4 and's still a mess.

[BraneyGumble]

they were probably milking the company for money while dragging their feet. look at how much time they spent on d4 and's still a mess.

Up for debate, but I thought that the game was/is fine and I played it on release and then in S1. Definitely much better than D3 was during the first 2 years or so.

And they absolutely made bank with Diablo.

[SirFapsAIot]

Cancelling any Blizzard game these days is a good thing, ALWAYS a good thing, considering Blizzard is nothing but pure garbage.

[JayJ350]

It must have sucked, no surprise how Blizzard is being redirected now that they are under Microsoft's control, ActiBliz was totally misdirected.

[Fred87nc]

All these employees are worth ass, meanwhile you got random developer making a game like palworld and selling millions ayy lmao. Corporate gaming is really brain dead

[ChristmasFnatic]

Reminds me of StarCraft Ghost.

[JustiNtense]

They must have looked at their 6 year old product as a giant turd after they saw Palworld come out.

[nkiritsis13]

codenamed Odyssey

Christ, there isn't even an original thought to their codenames.

The cultural dissonance is also probably hitting critical mass where they couldn't make anything before consulting several different sensitivity departments demanding conflicting changes while also being ping-ponged back and forth to upper management telling them monetize it more.

It must have sucked, no surprise how Blizzard is being redirected now that they are under Microsoft's control, ActiBliz was totally misdirected.

No kidding.

Look at how many IPs they hold that have been collecting dust when they could have made a killing, while they had at minimum 9 studios working with 15 studios total dedicated to Call of Duty.

How do you manage to tie up that many studios for a single franchise, regardless of how much money it prints, when said franchise is now known for being nothing but a cringe skin shop with a multiplayer mode attached and a running joke of a campaign being loosely stapled onto that? How did it take 7 studios to make Modern Warfare 3, just for Christopher Judge to roast the only reason it even exists as a standalone game in 10 words?

The overwhelming majority of ActiBlizz's profits, and ultimately the Call of Duty series' net profit is just low effort macro transactions and battle passes. They probably waste more money developing an entirely new excuse for a game each year when they could spit out more skins, more playable celebrities human garbage, and battle passes with the message, "you stupid apes will buy this copy-paste shít, anyways," while cutting the number of studios at least in half.

The Blizzard side isn't any better because they can't even come up with new games period, merely updating the same couple games over and over. They output more controversies than games and only continue to exist because the average Gamer™ simpanzee has the IQ of a wet pancake.