Especially after Palworld, the death of Blizzard's survival game makes me yearn for a AAA take on PC's most vibrant genre

Microsoft has laid off 1,900 staff across its gaming division, reportedly gutting entire departments across the company. Among them was the team behind Odyssey, the little-known Blizzard survival game that would have occupied the studio's first new IP since 2014's Overwatch, that has now been canceled. In development for six years and officially announced in 2022, Odyssey represents decades of lost person-hours. But more than that, it's a sign of Blizzard, Microsoft, and perhaps the AAA industry as a whole, utterly failing to adapt to one of the greatest genre successes of the last 20 years.

Palworld is currently the biggest game on Steam, a somewhat janky, arguably derivative early access release from a studio with a handful of under-the-radar games to its name. It followed a trajectory similar to Valheim's in 2021, another janky early access survival game from a debut studio. The list of the top 50 games on Steam by current players is filled with these games: Rust, Unturned, Enshrouded, Don't Starve Together, DayZ, Terraria, Ark. A full 20% of the most-played games on Steam are survival games, some of which I've never even heard of yet are pulling in tens of thousands of players on a weekday morning.

The sheer, enduring popularity of the genre makes the decision to cancel Odyssey - a game that so much time, money, and effort has been put into - a baffling one. Even more surprising are the circumstances around its failure. A report from Bloomberg states that Odyssey suffered as a result of "technical issues" surrounding its game engine. Blizzard executives reportedly chose to switch away from Unreal Engine, moving to an internal engine that the company had primarily developed for mobile gaming. 

The decision behind that is said to have stemmed from Blizzard's desire for Odyssey to support 100 players on the same map at the same time, but it led to extreme slowdown on the project, with Bloomberg reporting artists would have to prototype work in Unreal, knowing that it would be "discarded" rather than transferred to the new engine.

I won't pretend to understand the complexities of game development, nor to suggest that the loss of any single game is worse than the lost livelihoods of nearly 2,000 developers. But the fact that a new Blizzard IP in a perennially popular genre would be left to suffer through development like this is truly astonishing. And while Microsoft as a whole might borrow some survival game credit from its ownership of Minecraft and the existence of Grounded and State of Decay, the treatment of Odyssey is, to me, indicative of the AAA industry's lack of respect or appreciation for one of the most successful genres in the world.

Survivor

Of all the top-rated survival games on Steam, not a single one comes from a major developer (unless you count the survival tags added to games like Resident Evil 4 and Dying Light). And even when we look to games like Grounded, Minecraft, or State of Decay, we find games or series that were already successful - or at least in active development - before Microsoft bought the studios that were making them. 

There are myriad reasons why a major publisher might steer away from survival games: these are titles unforgiving enough that they're thought to not appeal to the mass market; they're complicated to make and balance without relying on early access, which big studios tend to steer away from; and they often require years of support but are hard to monetize in the long-term. I also wonder whether a proud legacy of early access jank has soured executives on the very idea of survival games - these are projects that tend to look and feel a certain way, and that way is not the kind of high budget blockbuster that major studios tend to pin hundreds of millions of dollars on.

Yet it remains the case that these games can be defining hits. Valheim is still a notable cultural touchstone in this genre. I imagine Palworld has already become something similar. Not all of these games hold attention forever, but the ones that do are still boasting massive player counts the better part of a decade after their original releases. Yet one of the only truly high profile AAA attempts to to break into the genre has been scrapped. The developers who poured years of their lives into Odyssey deserved better, and I'm sure that the passion and hard work they expended would have created something excellent, whether or not they could fit 100 players into a server. But in the increasingly risk-averse upper echelons of the industry are people who don't see the promise in a genre that consistently beats expectations, and now we might never know what a Blizzard-grade survival game would have looked like.

For now, here's our list of the best survival games.