Late last week, it was announced that Microsoft had laid off around 1,900 employees from its gaming teams following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Part of those layoffs included developers at Blizzard Entertainment, which helped lead to the scraping of the new untitled survival game the company was working on. Of course, losing a job is never something anyone wants to go through, but at least one former Blizzard employee was able to use his employee perks to score 10 years' worth of World of Warcraft time on his way out the door. It likely doesn't make the layoff sting any less, but at least he'll be able to jump into WoW for a decade without paying the monthly fee.

Once I realized what was happening and that I was gonna be laid off, I made sure to jump into keyring and use all the 1-year subscription codes I have left.

😂 pic.twitter.com/HfS5M4Fb8T

— adamholisky.bsky.social (@AdamHolisky) January 26, 2024

The developer in question is Adam Holisky. Previously, Holisky worked for Blizzard as the product lead at Core Technology. Like several others, Holisky found out he'd been hit by the layoffs on January 25, but before the news was made official, he quickly took advantage of one of his employee perks to grant himself the decade of World of Warcraft time.

It's a relatively well-known fact among the WoW community that one of the perks of working at Blizzard is that employees can get 1-year subscription codes to bypass the monthly fees. Holisky had ten of these waiting on his account, and he claimed them all to stretch his subscription to October 14th, 2033. Considering World of Warcraft currently has three more expansions in the works, Holisky will be able to hop into anything the team puts out, assuming he wants to pay for the expansions themselves.

For reference, a 12-month WoW sub will cost players $12.99 per month. If you were to buy that sub every year for the next decade, you'd be shelling out more than $1,550. That's a significant chunk of savings, especially if you're someone who loves playing WoW. Granted, you'll still need to spend $50 every couple of years for the expansions, but that's a small price to pay compared to what most people spend.

Blizzard Survival Game Cancelled
As mentioned above, one of the most notable announcements following the layoffs was that Blizzard had cancelled yet another promising project. The team hasn't been afraid to axe projects, regardless of how far along they might be. Remember, this is the studio that let journalists see a relatively polished portion of Starcraft: Ghost before shelving the project.

However, the survival game, which was reportedly codenamed Odyssey, is seemingly no more. Blizzard has been working on this for over six years, so we might see elements of it pop up in future projects. After all, Overwatch was originally an MMO called Titan before that was scrapped and Blizzard used the lore and some assets to build the hero shooter. We may see something similar happen here, though that could also be wishful thinking.

Posted: Feb 03, 2024 10:40 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/blizzard-developer-decade-of-world-of-warcraft-time-pc/