The media noted this week that dozens of King employees were transferred to Blizzard in June and July to work on an unannounced project. Well-known gaming insider Jez Corden told details about what he knows about the new team being formed within Blizzard.
Jez Corden claims that Microsoft and Activision have approved the creation of a new team within Blizzard. It will be made up largely of former employees of the King games division. According to Corden, Microsoft wants to “curate and service Blizzard’s iconic franchises like Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch in a more productive way than Activision has done in the past.” This requires new teams, and one such team has now been formed within Blizzard.
Corden says, citing sources, that the new team at Blizzard will work on smaller, “AA” games based on existing franchises within Blizzard’s universes. King is known to have worked on mobile. Jez Corden isn’t sure, but he suggests that it’s possible the team will work on mobile games made to support the Xbox Mobile Games Store on iOS and Android. He notes, however, that he can’t say for sure at this point whether the new team will be limited to mobile. Given Microsoft’s strategy of releasing games everywhere, it’s possible that the new projects could work on multiple platforms.
In the same article, the insider notes that Microsoft is trying to experiment with game formats, trying to achieve success with small teams of developers integrated into large studios. According to him, the corporation, like other large publishers, is now increasingly concerned about the monstrously inflated costs of developing AAA games. A new format of cooperation between small teams of developers within large studios should reduce costs and allow for continuous content release.
