Blizzard Scaling Back Development on Heroes of the Storm

In an end-of-day news dump on its website, Blizzard has announced that it is taking development resources away from Heroes of the Storm and eSports initiatives for the game will not return in 2019.

The news post comes from Blizzard CEO J. Allen Brack and executive team member Ray Gresko, who were promoted to their current positions after Mike Morhaime stepped down as President and CEO in October. They mention that Blizzard has “more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company’s history,” and in order to further develop said projects, the studio “made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams.” Blizzard will apparently continue to develop new heroes and other types of content for the game, but “the cadence will change.” According to Brack and Greskso, the studio is “setting up the game for long-term sustainability.”

In addition to shifting resources away from Heroes, the post mentions that the Heroes Global Championship and Heroes of the Dorm, a collegiate eSports tournament for the game, will not be making a return. Blizzard states that “The love that the community has for these programs is deeply felt by everyone who works on them, but we ultimately feel this is the right decision versus moving forward in a way that would not meet the standards that players and fans have come to expect.”

Back in mid-October, former Heroes Game Director Alan Dabiri announced that he’d be leaving the team to work on another project at Blizzard, but a new game director wasn’t announced at the same time. Additionally, at BlizzCon 2018, there wasn’t much shown for the game in terms of new content updates. A few new skins and one new hero got announced, but there was no news regarding new battlegrounds or future heroes. When looking back at these events, Blizzard’s reduced commitment to Heroes of the Storm is far less surprising.