Blizzard’s Project Titan veering away from MMO subscriptions

Blizzard’s mysterious Project Titan has undergone a major change of direction, according to the developer’s president Mike Morhaime.

Blizzard is said to have downscaled its team size and changed the planned business model for the next generation MMO as the studio gives the project a sharp rethink.

“We’re in the process of selecting a new direction for the project and re-envisioning what we want the game to be,” said Morhaime during an Activision Blizzard earnings call this week.

“While we can’t talk about the details yet, it is unlikely to be a subscription-based MMO RPG.”

Core development of Project Titan has reportedly been underway for at least four years, and its team size was said to be over 100 staff.

Though only fragments of information have been released about the game, reports claimed that a release window of 2016 had been set.

However, Morhaime said that “there has not been an officially announced or projected release date” for the game.

He added: “What I can say is that the commitment to quality has always been at the core of Blizzard values, and we’ve gone through this type of iterative development process several times in the past on the way to creating genre-defining games.

“As we continue our assessment, we have shifted some of the resources from the team to our other franchises including World of Warcraft and Blizzard All-Stars which we believe will add immense value to those projects.”

World of Warcraft has been losing large amounts of subscribers in the recent times. Some of this has been blamed on the rise of free-to-play games, as its competitors, such as Guild Wars and Warhammer Online, enticing users with or making the switch to the tier business model.