Blizzard's 'Heroes of the Storm' scaled back, developers shift to other games

Heroes of the Storm is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game developed Blizzard Entertainment. It features characters from all of the company's acclaimed franchises like Diablo, Overwatch, and more. While the title started off as a somewhat lackluster experience, it has become quite addictive in recent months. The continued support and the odd mashups are the reason behind its relative success.

Unfortunately, it seems like Heroes of the Storm is one game that Blizzard doesn't feel needs so much attention. In a post on the game's website, Blizzard President J. Allen Brack and Vice President Ray Gresko said that developers were being shifted to other projects. You can read an excerpt from the statement below.

We're constantly changing and evolving not only our games, but how we support and grow them. This evolution is vital to our ability to continue doing what we love to do — making great games — and it's what makes Blizzard, Blizzard. Over the past several years, the work of evaluating our development processes and making hard decisions has led to new games and other products that we're proud of. We now have more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company's history. We're also at a point where we need to take some of our talented developers and bring their skills to other projects. As a result, we've made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams, and we're excited to see the passion, knowledge, and experience that they'll bring to those projects. This isn't the first time we've had to make tough choices like this. Games like Diablo II, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Overwatch, and more would not exist had we not made similar decisions in the past. Despite the change, Heroes of the Storm remains our love letter to Blizzard's worlds and characters. We'll continue actively supporting the game with new heroes, themed events, and other content that our community loves, though the cadence will change. Ultimately, we're setting up the game for long-term sustainability. While we don't make these decisions lightly, we do look to the future excited about what the decisions will mean for our other live games and all the projects we have in the works.

It's unclear what this means for the future of Heroes of the Storm. We should probably expect less content. A lot of gamers who love the title won't be happy, that's for sure. Hopefully the game won't be abandoned in the future because usually scaling back development is the first sign. Heroes of the Storm isn't an ultra-popular game for the company so it's not out of the realm of possibility.

See at Battle.net

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Asher Madan

Asher Madan handles gaming news for Windows Central. Before joining Windows Central in 2017, Asher worked for a number of different gaming outlets. He has a background in medical science and is passionate about all forms of entertainment, cooking, and antiquing.