Last October, we announced that Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase were collaborating to create a new MMORPG for mobile devices, which we have referred to until today with the provisional name Warcraft Mobile. Today, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports that due to a dispute over the video game financing, the two studios have decided to stop development and cancel the project, pulling the plug after three years of production. The same thing happened with another mobile game, an unannounced augmented reality title in the wake of Pokémon GO.
According to Jason Schreier, Blizzard Entertainment has worked on four mobile video games in recent years, five if you consider the support for Hearthstone. The first of these was Diablo Immortal, regularly released last June and proved to be a great success, while the second is the newly announced Warcraft Arclight Rumble, a strategic game coming out this year. Two video games are missing, the MMORPG Warcraft Mobile and the augmented reality game for iOS and Android, both canceled after three and four years of development.
The Bloomberg article reads that Warcraft Mobile was developing under the codename “Neptune” and was supposed to be a World of Warcraft spin-off set in the same universe. The announcement was expected for this summer, but we will never see it. On the other hand, the second video game had been in production for four years with the working title “Orbis” and was recently canceled; it is not clear why. We do not know if Blizzard will comment on the news, but if at least one of the mobile games is not presented by the end of the year, we will still have an answer.
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