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Microsoft and Activision have formed a splinter team focused on AA development on its existing IPs, using King as the base, and Blizzard as the new name.
This had been an ongoing project, and employees of King (an Activision subsidiary) have been incorporated into the new team. You might typically recognise this studio as the team that brought you the highly esteemed Candy Crush Game.
As reported by Windows Central’s Jez Cordon “sources indicate that Microsoft and Activision have approved the creation of a new team within its Blizzard subsidiary, comprised mostly with employees from King … [Windows Central are] told Microsoft and Activision’s new team within Blizzard is tasked to work on “AA” smaller games based on existing franchises within the Blizzard universes. Given King’s mobile expertise, it’s possible that these will be mobile games aimed to support Xbox’s planned mobile gaming store for iOS and Android — although [WC is] not entirely sure that they’ll be restricted specifically to mobile.”
Both Microsoft and Activision have pretty active mobile verticals when it comes to its development side, and Blizzard’s are catching up first. Unfortunately, I wish the shift away from AAA production is as promising as it sounds. There are two possibilities here; Microsoft and its subsidiaries have realised that the AAA-live-service-hegemony is doomed (see Bungie layoffs, Redfall’s dramatic failure, Suicide Squad’s embarrassingly drawn out existence) and that the best future for business and consumer focuses on creating enjoyable, creative games without the universal scope that’s expected, or we’re going to be slowly poisoned by a catalogue of worthless mobile games.
Jez Corden says “sources tell [him] that Microsoft is keen to explore and experiment finding success out of smaller teams that are also integrated with the larger org, almost Nintendo-style for seamless collaboration.” This sounds incredibly promising in light of Microsoft’s acquisition practices in the past few years. Unfortunately, it’s hard to believe this. Just a few months earlier, Xbox and Microsoft took a blunt hammer to Tango Gameworks and tore Shinji Mikami’s former studio down. Especially in light of the incredibly warm reviews it had, stature and iconicity for Xbox players, downright mastery, it’s hard to see why Microsoft are committed to this now, when they had it before.
It does feel a little like the games industry has gone full MCU; corporate team-ups and odd cameos. And we all know how Deadpool & Wolverine went.
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