Is the MMO as we know it dead? After seven years in development and having never been officially announced or unveiled by the company, Blizzard revealed that they have cancelled Project Titan, the next-generation MMO that was to succeed World of Warcraft.

Blizzard revealed the fate of Project Titan in an interview by Polygon with CEO Mike Morhaime and senior vice president of story and franchise development Chris Metzen.

In talking about the company’s work on Titan, Morhaime said:

“We set out to make the most ambitious thing that you could possibly imagine. And it didn’t come together. We didn’t find the fun. We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a re-evaluation period, and actually, what we re-evaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”

As Blizzard never officially revealed any details about Titan other than it was an MMO and they were developing it, we don’t actually know what it was supposed to be. It was the subject of many rumours that speculated that it was a successor to World of Warcraft or a sci-fi multiplayer.

What we do know about Titan was that it was in-progress for six years until Blizzard effectively went back to the drawing board on the game in 2013. At that point, the project’s expected release date was pushed back to 2016. It turns out that the project will never see the light of day.

For most developers, scrapping a seven-year long project would financially cripple a company to the point of closure. Most publishers would shove it out the door anyway to recover costs (see The Bureau: XCOM Declassified). To their credit, Blizzard bit the financial bullet and were able to weather eating those costs without the whole company going under.

Sources: Polygon, Kotaku