At BlizzCon 2018, a recent interview with Blizzard Co-Founder and Executive Producer Allen Adham gave insight to the production of games within the company. He claimed that roughly 50% of the company’s projects are scrapped before ever seeing the light of day. Elements of those which are scrapped may be repurposed for other titles, but everything else gets buried.
Here?s what Adham said, regarding the cutting process:
We have roughly a 50-percent success rate. I do a presentation internally for Blizzard and for the Activision companies at large, sometimes our brothers and sisters at King or Activision, Treyarch, Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, they?re curious to hear how our incubation process works. I have a slide where it shows a curtain, you know, and how does Blizzard consistently make great games and it shows a picture of Blizzard covered by a curtain, and the next slide is this terrifying-looking clown. The truth is, behind the curtain, it?s a horror show. But most people outside of Blizzard don?t realize around half of our titles don?t see the light of day. So, people who think we?re a consistent company, we?re only consistent in that we only release the really amazing games. Interestingly, Adham mentioned two canceled Blizzard titles that paved the way for their fully realized properties in the interview. Nomad, a squad-based sci-fi RPG, apparently led to World of Warcraft, and an MMO named Titan to Overwatch.
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