Blizzard has decided to end active development and hero updates on Heroes of the Storm. The game will continue to run for the time being, with future patches aimed at necessary bug fixes and maintenance.
With a statement announcing the change, Blizzard’s statement mentioned that the game has been running for seven years and there is still an active community playing the game. They’ve decided not to shut it down, but to continue offering Heroes of the Storm while ending active development on it.
“Moving forward we will support Heroes in a manner similar to our other longstanding games, StarCraft and StarCraft II. In the future, we’ll continue seasonal rolls and hero rotations, and while the in-game shop will remain operational there are no plans for new for-purchase content to be added. Future patches will primarily focus on client sustainability and bug fixing, with balance updates coming as needed.
As a token of our appreciation, we are gifting the incredibly rare Epic Arcane Lizard mount to all players with next week’s patch.”
The game being in maintenance mode isn’t new, as the mention of StarCraft and StarCraft II indicate, and not putting resources into new content means they are still able to be there for community members to access. While those strategy games have their competitive and story-based single-player content, Heroes of the Storm is a competitive game, being a MOBA, so the life and health of the game will likely depends on the player numbers the game is able to maintain.
Putting things into barebones maintenance mode does buy time though.
Heroes of the Storm, which didn’t always get the same sort of attention as other MOBAs like League of Legends and DoTA 2, still managed to be an active part of Blizzard’s slate. Occasional crossovers between games, such as when Overwatch’s Zarya was added as a hero, also took place.
Read the announcement over at Heroes of the Storm.
