Blizzard has poured seven long years of development of the unofficially announced next-generation massively multiplayer online role-playing game 'Titan,' after the game developer said last year it was going to re-evaluate its intentions with the new game.
Speaking to Polygon, Blizzard senior vice president of story and franchise development Chris Metzen said cancelling 'Titan' even before it was released was an "excruciating" decision but one the company ultimately had to make because the developers of the game realized they were only working on 'Titan' because of a "sense of inertia and obligation and identity that we hold in ourselves and the community may also hold toward us."
Blizzard is best known for the blockbuster MMORPG 'World of Warcraft,' the highest-grossing video game of all time and which currently has seven million subscribers around the world. At its peak, 'WoW' had more than 12 million subscribers, with Blizzard saying more than 100 million accounts created since the ten-year-old game was released in 2004.
"Is this really who we are?" said Metzen. "Is this really what we want? Is this really what we want to burn our passion and our work lives, our careers on, for years on end? Are we the MMORPG company?"
Last year, reports surfaced that Blizzard had pushed the reset button on 'Titan' development, with the company breaking down the 100-person 'Titan' team to work on other Blizzard projects and leaving only 30 developers behind for the "core team."
"We didn't find the fun," said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. "We didn't find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a re-evaluation period, and actually, what we re-evaluated is whether that's the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no."
This isn't the first time Blizzard has cancelled some of its most high-profile projects. The company also cancelled the military stealth-action 'StarCraft: Ghost' and the point-and-click adventure game 'Warcraft Adventures' even before they were released, but Metzen said cancelling the games had "always resulted in better-quality work."
"The discipline of knowing when to quit is important," he said. "We were losing perspective and getting lost in the weeds a little."
For some analysts, such as Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities, cancelling 'Titan' could lead to a problem for Blizzard, which is now faced with the task of finding a replacement for 'WoW' with subscriber numbers now in decline with free-to-play games becoming increasingly more popular.
"At their lead time, there won't be a game for years," Pachter said. "So they have to deal with inevitable declines in revenues and no new game on the horizon."
However, as Ben Kuchera of Polygon notes, cancelling a game seven years in development "is one of the most telling examples of Blizzard's power."
"Killing the game now, and still having two of the most promising titles in active development in 'Hearthstone' and 'Heroes of the Storm,' not to mention the still-popular 'World of Warcraft,' shows the power and might of Blizzard," Kuchera wrote. "And it may be a situation where a failed project makes them one of the more admired developers in the business."
