Blizzard Moving Resources Away from HOTS

When people think of Blizzard, a few games pop into mind immediately: Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Diablo, maybe Hearthstone… one game that’s fairly consistently forgotten, though, is Heroes of the Storm, their big crossover MOBA where characters from every corner of Blizzard’s expansive IP library come together to destroy towers, kill minions, and generally hurt each other. It’s an enjoyable game and was extremely hyped when it first came out, but once the dust settled it was clear that this project was never going to be quite as big as DOTA 2 or League of Legends.

Which is why it’s not surprising that Blizzard would make the call to end the HOTS esports league and move some of its developers to other projects: frankly, it’s more surprising they didn’t do that sooner.

Over the past several years, the work of evaluating our development processes and making hard decisions has led to new games and other products that we’re proud of. We now have more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company’s history. We’re also at a point where we need to take some of our talented developers and bring their skills to other projects. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams, and we’re excited to see the passion, knowledge, and experience that they’ll bring to those projects.

This isn’t the end of Heroes of the Storm, however, as there are still developers working on it, who will continue to release new characters, themed events, and other content. But things will slow down, obviously, and it means that any future HOTS competitions will have to be sponsored and hosted by other people… although Blizzard would probably give it their full, non-financial support.

It’s bad news for fans, but not terrible news… yet. If this is just a slowdown, that’s fine. But if it’s the first step of an eventual shutdown, well… that’s not quite as fine. That doesn’t look terribly likely, but the chances aren’t 0, so we’ll just have to see.