Opinion: How Hearthstone may have killed a Titan

After almost seven years in the public eye, Blizzard has officially pulled the plug on its MMO, Project Titan. Its long development cycle hinted at trouble, but both Blizzard and parent company Activision seemed content to continue pumping money into the game, apparently trusting the promise of breakout success. So what changed? Blizzard has recently learned to follow the interests and instincts of its developers, since smaller projects can yield massive success too. Projects like Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

Picture, if you will, the sheer size and scope of a game that has been in development for almost a decade. At its largest, the team was 100 workers strong. Blizzard constantly talked it up in terms of scale. It was meant to be a successor to the wildly successful World of Warcraft, and even the title invoked the idea that this was its largest undertaking to date. It wasn't just large, it was a Titan. Even modest development costs over a cycle that long would yield a rather large bill, and it was only growing as time went on.

More importantly, MMOs are going through an identity crisis. World of Warcraft is one of a dwindling number of healthy subscription-based MMOs, and even that has been compromised to an extent. Blizzard indicated that Titan would likely follow a free-to-play model, but even then new MMO launches are making less of a splash every year. And if it was meant to be WoW's successor, even that game has been slowly losing subscribers. MOBAs are the new popular genre du jour, and Blizzard already has that covered. 

It's no wonder that as of last year, CEO Mike Morhaime said the game was being revamped. It couldn't continue to ignore some of these simple business realities. After so long in development, though, Blizzard was giving it one last shot. With so much time and effort riding on it already, Titan had to prove it was worth the titanic cost.

In any company, part of evaluating a cost is judging its worth next to other revenues, as well as the potential for other revenues. That's where Hearthstone comes in. The plucky card game is everything Titan wasn't. It was created by a small team of developers. Even after bulking up, the so-called "Team 5" is still composed of only 25 members--a fourth of the size of Titan at its peak. Instead of a long development cycle, it utilized a short and simple one that put out the game in beta quickly and rolled into the full version shortly after. 

The reward for this effort has been staggering. The company recently announced that it has reached 20 million players, Even if a small fraction are paying for card packs, arena runs, and the Naxxramas expansion, this makes for a massive revenue stream. Activision took notice. In May, only two months after its official release, Activision's earnings report listed it as one of the six games that it projected would boost it into record-breaking numbers. Hearthstone shared this spotlight with games like Call of Duty, Skylanders, and Destiny. Not bad for a little F2P project brainstormed by a few staff members.

Given this, it would be downright foolish to continue shoveling money into Titan. Morhaime's comments on the cancellation make the reasoning crystal clear. He noted that they couldn't find the passion, a notable difference from the small band of Blizzard developers who made Hearthstone because they genuinely love collectible card games. More telling is the statement by Chris Metzen, senior president of story and franchise development. Though he didn't mention Hearthstone by name, he might as well have:

"Maybe we can be what we want to be and inspire groups around the company to experiment, get creative, think outside the box and take chances on things that just might thrill people," he said. "Maybe they don't have to be these colossal, summer blockbuster-type products."

Maybe they just have to be Hearthstone.

Blizzard faced a choice between spending untold amounts on a behemoth of a game in a genre that's on its way out, or freeing its staff up to work on smaller projects that played to their passions. It paid off beautifully once before. Blizzard seems to be hoping lightning will strike twice, and facilitating that development environment is the best business move it could make.