Blizzard and NetEase reportedly cancel a Warcraft mobile MMO

digitaltrends.com:

A Warcraft mobile MMO from Blizzard and NetEase is reportedly canceled after three years of development.

This spinoff project, codenamed Neptune, was a mobile MMO World of Warcraft spin-off that took place during a different time period. Blizzard and NetEase scrapped it due to an unspecified financial disagreement This news comes by way of a Bloomberg report, citing people familiar with the game’s development. Bloomberg reached out to NetEase and Activision Blizzard for comment on the project’s status, but neither company chose to comment on the matter.

NetEase, a massive Chinese company that publishes and funds many video game projects — including the recent Diablo Immortal mobile game — reportedly disbanded a team of over 100 developers that were working on the unannounced Warcraft mobile MMO. According to Bloomberg, NetEase did not transfer most of the developers elsewhere within the company.

As Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier explained, this isn’t the first time Blizzard has canceled a Warcraft mobile game. The company had also been working on a Warcraft mobile game similar to Pokémon GO but canceled it after four years of development. As Schreier notes, both of these canceled Warcraft mobile games had much longer development cycles than most mobile games. Another Warcraft mobile game, titled Warcraft Arclight Rumble, is announced and still in the work for iOS and Android.

Activision Blizzard is consistently making headlines throughout 2022, most notably due to Microsoft’s planned $68.7 billion acquisition of the company. This will certainly have an impact on future projects, as well as games currently in development across Activision Blizzard.