Earlier in the year, Blizzard Entertainment announced that it has plans for a Warcraft mobile title. That game turned out to be Arclight Rumble. But as it turns out, the company had another mobile title in the pipeline. This one sounds more ambitious, being a mobile spin off for the World of Warcraft MMORPG. A recent report claims that this one has been cancelled.
According to Bloomberg, this WoW spin off had been in development for three years, in partnership between Blizzard and NetEase. Those familiar with the name would know that the latter is not only a publishing partner for the former in China, but also the developer for the now infamous Diablo Immortal. The cancellation of the mobile spin off was reportedly due to disagreements between the two companies on financial terms.
Now that the mobile spin off for the MMO has been cancelled, NetEase has also disbanded a team of over 100 developers working on the title. Only a few among them were transferred internally to work on other things. It’s also worth noting that another previously announced Warcraft mobile title, which was supposed to be AR-based and would have played like Pokemon Go, was also cancelled at some point.
Either way, the dispute over this World of Warcraft mobile spin off could be quite the loss to both Blizzard and NetEase. As negative as the critical reception was to Diablo Immortal, it is hard to argue that it is anything but a success, financially speaking. It’s not difficult to imagine a World of Warcraft mobile spin off replicating that kind of success, even if it comes at the expense of player goodwill, which the company seems unreserved about cashing in. Though if one were to be optimistic, and there’s no evidence to support this, one could hope that this is Blizzard saying no to further eroding player goodwill in the name of profit.
(Source: Bloomberg)
