Blizzard's new mobile game announcement didn't piss everyone off this time

pcgamer.com:

Warcraft Arclight Rumble seems to have dodged the level of outrage that the last Blizzard mobile game announcement received. Perhaps that's because, unlike Diablo Immortal, Arclight Rumble wasn't announced during the same event as Blizzard's other massive games, and it isn't striking fans as a replacement for another game that we should have gotten instead. There was no exaggeration around its announcement: it was to be a Warcraft game for mobile. And that's exactly what we got.

Outside of places like the World of Warcraft subreddit, which is unsurprisingly full of derision for a game that is seen as a mobile cash grab ripoff, people seem willing to give Arclight Rumble a shot. Expectations were low and the game seems to have risen above them, or at least enough for people to quickly understand its fairly modest ambitions: Arclight Rumble isn't really for PC players in the same way that most Blizzard games are and have been for decades.

«I can't really bring my PC with me when I go for a sandwich at lunch. But I can absolutely play two or three games of this game, of Arclight, while we're sitting, waiting for food, and it's nice to be able to play wherever you are, and then also come back and do PC gaming. I don't see them as mutually exclusive. I think they can coexist—and do—and it's great,» associate game director Adam Kugler told me in an interview prior to the game's announcement.

For most of the world, this is how mobile games are played. That's why they're such a huge deal in Asia and continue to grow in North America. Mobile games brought in the most revenue compared to PC and console games in 2020. Phones are the new PC for so many people these days; it's where you chat with your friends, where you watch Twitch