Project Titan was billed as Blizzard’s big next-gen MMO push, so it’s somewhat surprising to hear that the developer has pulled the plug on the entire project.
Talking to Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime explained the reasons behind the decision, citing a lack of passion and a reluctance to become known as ”the MMO company”.
”We didn’t find the fun,” Morhaime continued. ”We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”
Blizzard’s VP of franchise development Chris Metzen called the decision ”excruciating”.
“The discipline of knowing when to quit is important,” he added. “We were losing perspective and getting lost in the weeds a little. We had to allow ourselves to take that step back and reassess why the hell we were doing that thing in the first place.”
With World of Warcraft still sitting pretty on over 7 million subs, and with the Warlords of Draenor expansion out later this year, it’s probably a sensible decision not to compete in that market with another big MMORPG.”We don’t want to identify ourselves with a particular genre. We just want to make great games every time,” summed up Metzen. ”I wouldn’t say no to ever doing an MMO again,” Morhaime clarified. ”But I can say that right now, that’s not where we want to be spending our time.”
Although it’s always a surprise to see such a big developer decide to give up on a big project, in hindsight the signs were there that Titan was in trouble. Last year Blizzard confirmed that they had cut resources from the project, and that they were looking for a new direction for the game, which was now ”unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG”.
So it looks like WoW will continue to be Blizzard’s heavy hitter in the MMO genre for a while yet. “My hope personally is that we’ll support it forever,” said Metzen.
