Vicarious Visions Officially Merged with Blizzard - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 April 2022 / 2,362 Views
Activision Blizzard in January 2021 announced it had moved Vicarious Visions, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 developer, from the Activision side of the business to the Blizzard side.
Vicarious Visions has now announced via Twitter they have officially merged with Blizzard Entertainment. They will remain located in Albany, NY and fully dedicated to developing Blizzard games.
"We've officially merged with Blizzard Entertainment," reads the tweet from Vicarious Visions. "Our development team will remain in Albany, NY and fully dedicated to Blizzard games."
It isn't known what Blizzard game Vicarious Visions is working on.
We've officially merged with Blizzard Entertainment. Our development team will remain in Albany, NY and fully dedicated to Blizzard games. We invite you to follow us @Blizzard_Ent
— Vicarious Visions (@VvisionsStudio) April 12, 2022
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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DAMN IT! I was hoping the Xbox/Acti-Blizz acquisition was going to be finalized in time to stop this merger.....RIP Vicarious Visions
Idk why Blizzard, a major developer/publisher, that has at least 5,000 employees, would need a subsidiary support studio in the first place. Cleaning house is more needed than we probably think
Wow another studio for Xbox=)
These the people behind Saints Row?
And both now belong to MS so nothing really changes.
Not for another year. So not much MS can do about this and even by then, Vicarious will be so ingrained into Blizzard they may not be interested in reversing the merger. Vicarious would've been great on making another Spyro or even a new Tony Hawk game, but oh well.
But they being under Blizzard won't prevent it developing Spyro.
We have to assume it will. Otherwise this wouldn't be news at all.
They literally said "fully dedicated to Blizzard games" which sounds pretty set in stone. But it is something that can be undone when Microsoft takes ownership of the company.
Not if we believe that MS is hands off with the devs and pubs they bought. That decision would be made by the Acti+Bliz board.
And about the Blizzard Games yes that would prevent they from doing those 2 IPs or others, but merging with Blizzard itself wouldn`t prevent it if they decided to allow the studio to do those games (but them they probably wouldn't have merged... although I do think it is tremendous waste to put them to do support for a very old MMO, yes I know it brings a lot of money, same as is a waste to have all Acti studios doing CoD).
MS has actually already expressed how they won't be as hands off with Activision Blizzard. Unlike XGS and Bethesda that will be reporting to Matt Booty, AB will report directly to Phil Spencer and he explained how he was going to approach each individual studio to see what they want to work on.
Plus, there's a lot of cleaning house that will need to be done and Phil has said how much of a massive undertaking AB is going to be.
I'm just hoping AB will finally be able to return somewhat to its former glory. Blizzard was my favorite developer since childhood and it killed me to see how low they've become over the past decade. It appears Vicarious was brought on to fix development of Diablo II Resurrected and then they'll be working on Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV. They won't be working on WoW.
Wow. That's kinda bogus.
Don't forget about the entire Skylanders franchise. -_-
Good intel, I did not know that!
They also done the great remaster of the Spyro
Essay Pro