Nestled in today’s Activision Blizzard’s quarterly earnings report (which was curiously delivered as a press release and not a traditional call ostensibly because of its pending acquisition by Microsoft and possibly the myriad other things going on over there) is the news Blizzard is working on a new Warcraft mobile title slated for a 2022 release.
According to the press release, “Blizzard is planning substantial new content for the Warcraft franchise in 2022, including [...] getting all-new mobile Warcraft content into players’ hands for the first time.” The press release doesn’t go into detail about the new game or when we can expect to hear more. For now, all we know is that it’s Warcraft, and it’ll be mobile.
The news coincides neatly with the earnings report also revealing consumers spent over a billion dollars on Call of Duty Mobile in 2021 and Candy Crush’s continued dominance of the app store revenue leaderboards.
It’s interesting that Activision Blizzard is planning this Warcraft mobile title for this year. Diablo Immortal — a Diablo mobile game — has been in development since its announcement in 2018 and is also scheduled for a 2022 release. The seemingly short distance between announcement and theoretical release might be a lesson learned from Overwatch 2’s premature reveal. It’s also possible this mobile game isn’t as expansive as Diablo Immortal and therefore doesn’t require the same amount of development time. Regardless, between this sudden news of a Warcraft mobile game and the announcement of a wholly new Blizzard-developed survival game, the company is putting its best foot forward to its (pending) Microsoft overlords.
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