Inside Blizzard's Cancellations: Overwatch Decline, Scrapped Games, and Missed Opportunities

Renowned insider Jason Schreier has revealed new details about Blizzard's recent years, offering insights into the company's missteps and the absence of highly anticipated sequels to key franchises.

It turns out that the decline of Overwatch was primarily due to its development lead, Jeff Kaplan, not Bobby Kotick, as many in the community had believed. Following the tremendous success of the hero shooter, Kotick pushed to expand the team to the size of the Call of Duty development team and was willing to provide the necessary resources. The plan was for one group of developers to focus on supporting the game, while the other would work on the sequel. However, Kaplan refused this proposal, leading to major issues (as the existing team struggled to handle both games), and he ultimately left Blizzard.

Additionally, it's been revealed that an Overwatch animated series, which was supposed to launch on Netflix before the release of the second game, was canceled. This happened because of a lawsuit against Netflix after they poached Blizzard's CFO before his contract expired.

Blizzard had also considered developing Warcraft 4 or an RTS based on Call of Duty, but these ideas were rejected by company leadership after StarCraft 2 failed to deliver massive profits, even though it performed decently. Tim Morten, the development lead for StarCraft 2, hoped that the release of Warcraft 3: Reforged would prove the potential for reviving the real-time strategy genre. However, after the game's disastrous reception, most of the team left Blizzard and founded the independent studio Frost Giant, which has since launched the RTS Stormgate in early access, a spiritual successor to StarCraft.

In addition to the three StarCraft shooters, one of which is still in development, Blizzard had also started working on Minecraft- and God of War-style games set in the Warcraft universe. Unfortunately, all of these projects have now been canceled.

To make matters worse, the survival game set in a new universe, which was canceled earlier this year, adds to the growing list of abandoned projects. It paints a grim picture of Blizzard's current state, as many promising games that received significant financial and human investment will never see the light of day.