Titan's death may leave Blizzard's future in the hands of Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm

Blizzard Entertainment cancelled Titan. The publisher threw out the work it did on the massively multiplayer online follow-up to World of Warcraft, and it doesn’t sound like it’s even gonna try to force out another MMO role-playing game any time soon.

That leaves one of the most financially successful game publishers of the last 20 years in an interesting position. Blizzard may have to rely more and more on new models, like we’re seeing with its free-to-play releases Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm, to fill the massive hole on its balance sheet. World of Warcraft’s $15-per-month subscription model has 6.8 million members. That is already down 43 percent from a high of 12 million in 2010. That’s a ton of cash the company is no longer making, and things could get worse if WoW’s subscriber numbers keep falling. And the Titan cancellation highlights that Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm might never make the kind of money that World of Warcraft did.