Ex-Hearthstone Devs Announce Their Newest Project with Marvel

Five former members of Blizzard’s Hearthstone dev team have announced through their fledgling studio, their partnership with Marvel for an unnamed project. The studio, Second Dinner, posted a press release  to their website January 3 to announce their collaboration with entertainment dynamos, NetEase Inc. and Marvel. While the project has yet to be announced, NetEase has invested $30 million to the startup and Marvel leadership have been vocal about their excitement about the venture.

Second Dinner consists of Hamilton Chu and Ben Brode, the founders, as well as Mike Schweitzer, Yong Woo, and Jomaro Kindred. These members have worked cumulatively on Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and Call of Duty: Black Ops I – III. While the team maintains their sense of humor in the face of such large expectations, saying of their studio that

“it hasn’t published anything yet, but is pretty sure that it will someday,”

there’s no doubt that with this firepower they’re more than capable of delivering on that potential.

While Second Dinner just announced the partnership, internal playtesting has already begun on the unnamed project.

“It’s going to take us a while to make, but we’re already having a lot of fun with the prototype,” said Chu. “We can’t wait to show it to [people].”

While they haven’t announced a genre for the project, Brode did say that it would be created for mobile platforms.

NetEase is known across the world as a leading Chinese internet technology company. Working closely with Blizzard, the staff’s previous employer, they operate much of the popular internet gaming platforms for China. They aren’t strangers to this team, being the primary provider of Blizzard games to China. Marvel is a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company and focuses on character-based entertainment, which should be an excellent fit for the ex-Hearthstone and World of Warcraft team.

If you are interested and have experience in game development, Second Dinner is looking for a technical artist and client engineer for their team and have plans to expand to 10-15 people in the coming years. You can check out their posted jobs here. Whether you make the team or not, keep an eye out for the announcement later officially announcing the project.