Photographer: Troy Harvey / Bloomberg
Photographer: Troy Harvey / Bloomberg
Video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc. took another step in consolidating control of the Blizzard Entertainment division, which once prided itself on its autonomy, by moving a 200-person design studio to its ranks.
The studio, Vicarious Visions, has been a subsidiary of Activision since 2005 and has worked on such franchises as Skylanders, Crash Bandicoot and Tony Hawk. It will now focus entirely on Blizzard’s franchises, including Diablo, rather than making its own games. Former studio head of Vicarious Visions Jennifer Oneal joins Blizzard’s leadership team and reports directly to the president.
The news, reported by GamesIndustry.biz arrived just weeks after Blizzard quietly dismantled one of its internal development teams, according to people familiar with the company.
Blizzard, the maker of games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has traditionally developed most of its games in-house. But in recent years, Activision’s publishing house has taken over a stronger hand in Blizzard’s operations. Based in Albany, New York, Vicarious Visions has been working with Blizzard on the Diablo franchise since last year, including a planned remake of Diablo II, people familiar with the plans say. They asked not to be identified while discussing private information.
A Blizzard spokesperson declined to comment on Vicarious Visions’ current projects, only confirming that the studio has “been working with Blizzard for a while.”
Until last year, the Diablo II remake was to be developed by Blizzard’s Team 1, part of the company’s Irvine, California campus, which had become known for reworking classic games. The most recent release, in January 2020, was a remake called Warcraft III: Reforged. The title was poorly received for glitches and missing features, earning 59 points out of 100 on the review aggregator Metacritic – the lowest score a Blizzard game has ever achieved.
Team 1 members gathered to discuss what had gone wrong. Internal Blizzard documents reviewed by Bloomberg pointed to the game’s failures in areas including poor planning, miscommunication, and a hasty release due to financial pressure from management. For example, Blizzard announced the game in November 2018 and began taking pre-orders for 2019 without notifying most of the development team in advance, according to several people who worked on Warcraft III: Reforged.
Team 1 wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of Warcraft III: Reforged in its next project, the Diablo II remake. Shortly after the post-mortem, however, Blizzard pulled that project from the team and put the division behind Diablo IV in charge. A group at Vicarious Visions is also working on the remake, which was known as Diablo II: Resurrected.
On October 15, 2020, Blizzard informed the members of Team 1 that it was reorganizing the entire division, according to the people who worked on Warcraft III: Reforged. In the following weeks, members of the team were given the opportunity to apply for jobs elsewhere within Blizzard. Those who did not find positions in the company were gradually dropped. Others took to independent studios recently started by high-profile corporate veterans, such as Frost Giant Inc. and DreamHaven Inc., founded by Blizzard co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer Mike Morhaime, whose departure marked the start of the Activision acquisition on a large scale.
Team 1 was also responsible for the games Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II. Blizzard delayed development support for Heroes of the Storm in 2018. The same day Blizzard said it was reorganizing the division, it publicly announced that StarCraft II was halting all ongoing development.
Blizzard has promised to continue to fix and update Warcraft III: Reforged, although it will likely do so with another outsourced team. A spokesperson declined to confirm who will continue to develop Warcraft III: Reforged, but said, “We are still committed to providing updates to support the community.”