Microsoft and Blizzard Form New Team to Develop Small 'AA' Game

TapTechNews August 2nd news, in January this year, Microsoft's game division announced the layoff of 1900 people, and a large number of employees including Blizzard's president Mike Ybarra left. At the same time, an unnamed survival game that had been in development for many years was cancelled, but the company later started to recruit new people to develop another unannounced game.

WindowsCentral reported today that Microsoft has formed a new team with Blizzard to develop a small AA game. Allegedly, the new team is mainly composed of former King team members, and this small game is mainly based on Blizzard's existing game IPs such as Overwatch, Warcraft, and StarCraft, etc.

Since this new team is mainly composed of former King developers, WindowsCentral infers that this new game may be a mobile game, but it may also target other platforms. (TapTechNews note: King is a mobile game development studio under Activision Blizzard, and the income of its representative work Candy Crush accounts for nearly half).

Sources also mentioned that Microsoft hopes to make some changes and develop some smaller, and even possibly experimental games in order to save costs for AAA games. For example, Microsoft achieved extremely high earnings with the small game such as Phantom Beasts: Pawns earlier this year, and Microsoft will certainly learn a lot of experience from the success of this game.