Blizzard Entertainment’s Unannounced Survival Game Has Been Cancelled

Microsoft will share an update on the Xbox business later this week, the company confirmed Monday after weeks of reports and rumours of its first-party games coming to rival consoles. The Xbox parent will reveal its plans for the platform in a special edition of the Official Xbox Podcast on February 15 at 12pm PT (February 16, 1.30am IST in India), where Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, Xbox president Sarah Bond and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty will share details about the future Xbox roadmap. The confirmation comes after Spencer had promised last Tuesday that Microsoft would share its vision for the “future of Xbox” next week.

Microsoft Corp.'s plans to cut 1,900 jobs from its video game division contradict statements the company made to a US  court that it would operate the newly acquired Activision Blizzard Inc. independently, the US Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday.

Following the most recent round of layoffs from Microsoft's Xbox division, details about Blizzard's in-development survival game, Odyssey, have now leaked online. Microsoft first announced the major layoffs earlier this week, reporting that 1,900 employees from the company had lost their jobs as a result. The layoffs reportedly saw particularly heavy impact on Microsoft's gaming division, with Activision Blizzard, Xbox, and ZeniMax reportedly seeing the brunt of the layoffs. Now, one of the casualties of the layoffs comes as an in-development survival game from Blizzard.

Blizzard Entertainment's survival game, which it informally announced in 2022, was reportedly canceled over engine issues during its six years of development, according to a new Bloomberg report. This report follows yesterday's news that Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax divisions. Alongside this news, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he was departing from the company, and we learned the aforementioned survival game had been canceled. 

The first month of 2024 isn’t over yet, but it’s already been a brutal year for the games industry, with thousands of people having lost their jobs in a barrage of industry-wide layoffs. Microsoft recently added a significant chunk to that number when it announced that it would be cutting 1,900 jobs across its entire gaming division, and it seems those layoffs are also going to come at the cost of the company’s physical distribution.

Microsoft recently announced widespread layoffs, confirming that it was cutting 1,900 jobs across its entire gaming division– which, following the company’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, also includes Blizzard Entertainment. The layoffs have also gone hand-in-hand with the cancellation of Blizzard’s long-in-development survival game, codenamed Odyssey, which was officially confirmed to be in development in 2022, and a new report published by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has shed more light on what brought about the highly anticipated project’s cancellation.

Fresh details about Blizzard’s cancelled survival game have been revealed.

The president of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Ybarra, is departing the firm.

The recent layoffs across the various Microsoft studios include the vast majority of the customer service team at Blizzard. This means the multiple live service games run by Blizzard are currently operating with next to no moderators, game masters, and customer service representatives.

The development team behind Blizzard's now-cancelled survival game, reportedly called Odyssey, is seemingly among the teams dramatically impacted by the layoffs at Microsoft today.

Blizzard's unannounced survival game has been canceled after spending more than half a decade in development. The move, which is bound to disappoint many of the company's fans, stems from Microsoft's massive layoffs that were disclosed earlier today.

Following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is reportedly reducing of 1,900 employees from its workforce. While he didn’t confirm being part of the same, Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra has revealed that he is also departing the company.