It’s not a great week for game developers in general, but it’s especially true for Microsoft, which laid off 1,900 employees (8%) from its video game division. The layoffs affect several studios and labels, including Activision Blizzard, which joined the Microsoft group just three months after a lengthy acquisition process.
Affected games and teams include Odyssey, a survival game in development by Blizzard. The entire Odyssey team was let go, with president Mike Ybarra leaving along with chief design officer Allen Adham.
Today, new information has emerged regarding the status of the game and what ultimately led to its cancellation.
iGamesNews
Thanks to a new report from Bloomberg, we now know that Odyssey was in development for over six years, which, as the report points out, is longer than any of Blizzard’s previously canceled projects.
It appeared to be a major project for Blizzard, with its core team consisting of over 100 developers (it has since grown even further), and the studio viewed it as something new and fresh that could be turned into its own franchise, on par with World of Warcraft , Hearthstone, Overwatch, and Diablo.
According to reports, Odyssey’s pitch is simple: to be a survival game with the refinement, quality, and attention to detail that Blizzard is known for. According to a 2017 presentation by veteran World of Warcraft player Craig Amai, the game is said to have a massive map that can support up to 100 players at the same time.
Unfortunately, the technology powering the game was the source of the problem and what ultimately halted development. The Odyssey team has reportedly begun building a prototype using Unreal Engine.
Epic’s hugely popular engine reportedly couldn’t support the team’s 100-player ambitions, so Blizzard executives decided to switch to Synapse, an in-house engine originally developed for mobile devices.
This shift created its own set of problems, as the people working on the project simply couldn’t get Synapse to do what they wanted it to do fast enough, leading game artists to continue to rely on Unreal to prototype content because they knew it would take a while. Then discard.
Reporter Jason Schreier also revealed that some on the team are still committed to making games on Unreal Engine, and hope that Microsoft’s acquisition of the studio will provide them with the freedom to continue developing the Epic Engine instead of switching to Synapse.
Microsoft has taken a fairly hands-off approach to the studios it acquires, which includes letting each team choose the technology that makes sense for the project rather than forcing certain engines to cut costs. Sadly, this doesn’t happen in Odyssey.
Despite the depth of development and good playtesting, the game is still far from release, with some developers even calling the 2026 release target “overly optimistic.” Unfortunately, the developers realized that Synapse simply wasn’t ready and decided to cancel the game.
