Blizzard Entertainment (like the rest of Microsoft) has a wealth of beloved IP with a history of critical and commercial success that have been dormant for far too long now, but it seems the company is making movies to remedy that.
As reported by Windows Central, Microsoft and Blizzard Entertainment have formed a new development team within the latter that will be focused on developing smaller, AA games based on existing IP (of which Blizzard has a few, from StarCraft to WarCraft’s mainline RTS line of games).
The team is reportedly comprised primarily of former developers from King, the Activision (now Microsoft) owned studio that develops Candy Crush. As such, there’s a chance that the games it develops are geared at mobile audiences- though given Microsoft’s platform agnostic approach, that doesn’t necessarily have to mean they will be available exclusively on mobile devices.
The report goes on to claim that the formation of this new team is happening as Microsoft internally begins taking more steps to encourage the development of smaller, AA games that can be developed in less time, especially with growing industry-wide concerns of ballooning AAA budgets and development timelines.
The company is allegedly hoping for deeper collaboration between smaller teams throughout the organization, similar to Nintendo. It’s claimed that the smaller-scale Hi-Fi Rush did indeed fit that strategy, but that developer Tango Gameworks was shut down nonetheless due to the fact that it was located in Japan, making internal cross-collaboration more complicated.
Where the new development team within Blizzard Entertainment is concerned, it remains to be seen exactly what it is working on, though there’s certainly no doubt that there’s no shortage of beloved Blizzard IP that could benefit from smaller titles releasing at a more regular clip.
