Blizzard's New Survival Game Scrapped Amid Mass Layoffs by Xbox

Blizzard Entertainment has announced that its new survival video game which has been in the works for a prolonged period of time has now been canned. In the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the mega-corp revealed this morning that it would be laying off 1,900 people in total across all of its gaming verticals. These layoffs have impacted not only Activision and Blizzard, but also Bethesda and Xbox's own internal teams. Additionally, the departures seem to have resulted in Blizzard pulling the plug on its next big IP. 

Back in 2022, Blizzard publicly announced that it was in the process of working on a new survival game. In tandem with this reveal, Blizzard said that it was looking to staff up more heavily for the project, which was reportedly codenamed Odyssey. Despite having been in the works for over six years in some capacity, though, Blizzard decided to today end its work on the game. Based on comments from those at Blizzard, not everyone that was working on the game has been laid off as many are instead looking to be relocated to other projects at the company. 

"Today's actions affect multiple teams within Blizzard, including development teams, shared service organizations and corporate functions," said Xbox boss Matt Booty in an internal memo today (via The Verge). "As part of this focus, Blizzard is ending development on its survival game project and will be shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development."

While it's not known why those in charge at Blizzard ultimately decided to cancel this game, the move is a bit of an odd one, especially given the current popularity of the survival genre. This month's breakout hit, Palworld, also happens to fall within this same genre. Other titles such as Enshrouded, Sons of the Forest, Valheim, and Ark: Survival Ascended have all been pretty big in their own right in recent years and all are survival games as well. With this in mind, it seems like a survival game from Blizzard could have been incredibly big if done right, but now we'll simply never know how this title would have panned out. 

What do you think about this latest move at Blizzard involving the studio's survival game? Be sure to let me know either down in the comments section or reach out to me on social media at @MooreMan12.