Many tears were shed on the internet when Ben Brode left the Hearthstone team back in April of last year, as the dude basically was Hearthstone. Blizzard has (obviously) carried on, and loads of new personalities have bubbled up in the team to fill Ben’s shoes. Regardless, Brode fans have been super curious just what he’d do next, as when you’re the principal designer and game director of what is (in my opinion) the best Blizzard game, when you start your own thing you can basically do whatever you want. I was speculating they were going to do something in the PC space, or maybe even a physical board game (I’m not even sure where that notion came from), but we found out today that Ben Brode and the rest of the Second Dinner team are actually making a mobile game, with help from NetEase, and it’ll involve the Marvel IP.
They’re actively hiring right now to build the project, and the existing team is no joke. Their CEO is ex-Bungie and the rest of the team is jam packed with ex-Blizzard heavy-hitters. I even have a framed drawing by their art director, Jomaro Kindred, hanging as the center piece on my living room wall. Basically, what I’m getting at, is if I were a qualified client engineer or technical artist, I’d already be in my car on the way Irvine to try to get a job with them. They’re certified, card carrying, cool dudes from top to bottom.
While we’re obviously super excited to have folks with this level of talent working hard on a mobile game, being it’s directly in our wheelhouse, what I’m curious of is how the rest of the internet is going to react to this. As we saw with the announcement of Diablo Immortal (and what we’re fully aware of ’round these parts) is that it’d be difficult for gamer circles to think less of mobile games- Much less mobile games produced with a Chinese mega-publisher like NetEase having their finger in the pie which means it’ll undoubtedly be very free to play. It seems inevitable that people are going to be upset that Brode and friends left Blizzard to go work on a mobile game with the backing of the same publisher as the one making Diablo Immortal, eh?
But, hey, whatever. I know I’m ultra stoked for whatever Marvel game they’re working on, and the team has more then proven themselves in my eyes to be worthy of the greatest benefit of the doubt that what they’re working on is amazing. You don’t leave a role like all these guys left to go do some crappy mobile cash-in. Particularly, as again, I’m confident they could have raised money to do literally anything they wanted. As a creative person (and team), you don’t squander that kind of blank check opportunity.
