Xbox using Candy Crush developers to make new Blizzard games claims report

Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard may have been to bolster Xbox Game Pass and lift the division’s bottom line, but it seems Microsoft is now making moves to capitalise on its newly acquired IP.

While Microsoft has made headlines for closing studios, such as Tango Gameworks, a new report claims the company has set up a new team within Blizzard in order to create smaller AA games based on existing Blizzard franchises.

This team is said to be comprised ‘mostly’ of employees from King, the mobile developer best known for games like Candy Crush Saga.

According to Windows Central, Microsoft is ‘keen to curate and serve’ Blizzard franchises with this new team ‘more prolifically than Activision [Blizzard] itself did previously’. In other words, this means we could see more games based on franchises like Overwatch, Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has previously expressed his enthusiasm for the Warcraft and StarCraft franchises, so this might indicate that he’s getting the wheels in motion for a revival on the latter – although you wouldn’t expect that to be a AA project.

If this team is mostly formed of King developers though, there’s every chance this could be related to Xbox’s plans to start a new mobile store, as it attempts to rival Apple and Google.

At the moment though there’s no indication of whether the intended games will be released on mobile, console or both.

According to sources in the report, Microsoft is ‘keen to explore and experiment finding success out of smaller teams that are also integrated’ into the larger organisation, as concerns mount over the rising costs of AAA development.

This suggests we might see more Microsoft published games on a smaller scale, in the vein of Grounded or Pentiment. It also could lead to revivals of smaller properties under Activision Blizzard, like King’s Quest or Hexen – another IP Phil Spencer is a noted fan of.

So far, the main positive from the Activision Blizzard acquisition has been the addition of the company’s games on Xbox Game Pass. This began with Diablo 4 in February, with Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 set to arrive on the streaming service in October.