World of Warcraft – Expanding the Development Pipeline

With World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion now open for pre-orders and scheduled for a 2022 release, you might be wondering if there’s enough time left in the year for this expansion to be finished.

Well, apparently, the game’s team has recently been expanded thanks to Blizzard Entertainment’s acquisition of Proletariat, a Boston-based studio of industry veterans. Here’s more on that:

Hello, World of Warcraft community!

We know that you are hungry for new content and I’m really proud of how our development teams are working to meet or exceed those expectations – there’s more happening in WoW than ever, and this is just the beginning.

To help support our increased content needs, since May, we’ve been working with a great development partner, Proletariat. Proletariat was founded in 2012 by industry veterans from Turbine, Harmonix, Zynga and Insomniac. Their strong leadership team has a long history of working together, deep MMO experience working on Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online and D&D Online, and a strong presence in Boston, where they’re based.

Our work with the Proletariat team has been going well. Today we are excited to announce that Blizzard has closed the acquisition of Proletariat—something we’ve been working on for a while.

Together, our teams will expand our development pipeline for WoW. Our plan is to continue growing both our Irvine- and Boston-based teams, with shared creative leadership providing feedback to ensure we continue to meet or exceed players’ – and our – quality and delivery expectations. The addition of Proletariat brings 100 talented Blizzard employees to this newest Blizzard Entertainment Studio.

Proletariat’s transition to becoming part of Blizzard will take several months, and we look forward to all the ways our combined strength will help us meet our goals, help our teams, and better serve you.

Please join us in welcoming Proletariat to Blizzard! They are very much looking forward to working alongside the community to continue to build the future of World of Warcraft.

You can find the full press release on the announcement here.

And as a bonus, you can find a quick preview of Dragonflight’s updated Priest talent tree over here.