Blizzard has been in an odd place as of late, with its massive layoffs of nearly 800 employees, its lack of planned releases in 2019, and the fact that it won’t be attending Gamescom this year in order to work on games. Along with those points comes an interesting nugget of information from a former Blizzard developer. The now ex-employee, David Gibson, took to Twitter and mentioned that the game he and his team were working on for the past two years had been cancelled and would never see the light of day. The tweet can be seen below:
Well, today is my last day at Blizzard. Unfortunately you’ll never see what we made over the past 2 years-that’s gamedev, but we’ll always have Overwatch. 🙂
I get 6 weeks off(I need it) until my next gig starts,info soon.
And one last time, my OW Reel:https://t.co/2b7J88Gysw
❤️ pic.twitter.com/alwakoU9zA— David Gibson (@PoodleTime) June 5, 2019
Gibson mentioned he’d be leaving the company and that “Unfortunately you’ll never see what we made over the past 2 years-that’s gamedev.” This is sad news from a business point of view, but from a creator standpoint, as well. Putting two years into a project that would never be released is likely disheartening, and it’s a shame it was cancelled, but this is a common occurrence in the games industry. There are many projects and ideas that simply never see the light of day.
This likely is part of Blizzard’s new initiative to restructure the company and focus more on being more profitable, so evidently the project wasn’t coming along as well as the company had hoped. Either that, or it was not deemed to be a profitable business endeavor. It could also be that the idea simply wasn’t working out to the original vision, which can cause studios to scrap content and head back to the drawing board. We’ll likely never know for sure.
Interestingly, a user replied to Gibson’s tweet saying “Woah – your project got cancelled and I didn’t read about it on Kotaku?” Shortly after, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier replied “Well, not yet,” so we might be seeing something later down the road much in the vein of his Anthem expose.
Perhaps some of the assets used on this cancelled project will show up in a later game, or something similar so it’s not a waste, but we’ll just have to wait and see, even though it may never actually be public knowledge.
What do you make of the news that Blizzard had a game in development for two years, only to be cancelled? What do you think the project was? Let us know!
