The former Hearthstone head reveals what he is now working on: a Marvel game with substantial funding from NetEase. The team of ex-Blizzard employees is said to have 30 million US dollars available.
When Ben Brode left the Blizzard team of Hearthstone a few months ago, the shock was deep. After all, Brode was the “good mood” face of Hearthstone, always keeping the spirits up.
At the end of last year, he then founded the small studio “Second Dinner” with several other ex-Blizzard employees.
On Twitter and YouTube, they recently announced that their first project is slowly getting off the ground. They introduced their new office space and explained what they are now working on: a game set in the Marvel universe.
30 million $ budget: Ben Brode and Yong Woo sound quite proud as they explain that they have a total of 30 million dollars provided by NetEase and Marvel.
As a result, they claim to have “free rein” and could hire the best of the best to create a fantastic game.
Genre still unknown: However, there have been no concrete details about the game yet. Neither the genre nor the exact theme is known, although Second Dinner is already working internally on “some prototypes” that they are having “a lot of fun” with.
However, it will be a mobile game.
Team spreads good cheer: From the small introductory video, it is clear that the small development team is extremely cheerful and visibly satisfied with the funding. They appear very confident and optimistic and seem to be excited about working on a game whose worlds “they all learned to love as children from comics.”
They apparently have not forgotten their roots – in the background, you can see an Arthas statue.
We can only hope that Ben Brode’s team can build on the success of Hearthstone.
What are your expectations for Second Dinner? Do you have high hopes for the ex-employees of Blizzard in their new project? Or do you have doubts that these developers can “function” outside of Blizzard?
Ironically: NetEase makes a lot of money in China with Hearthstone as Blizzard’s partner there:
