New smartphone models with a special look catch the attention of WoW fans. Is this a sign of a mobile MMORPG “WoW-Mobile” or is Blizzard planning a strategy game with the WoW license?
“Do you guys not have phones?” is probably the most parodied sentence ever spoken by a Blizzard employee.
Since the announcement of Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon 2019, Blizzard fans have been fearing that the developer is focusing solely on the mobile market. This is also possible for World of Warcraft. At least a special smartphone design is currently heating up the discussion.
Designs for phones in WoW style
What is it about? The Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi introduced a special version of its smartphone “Redmi Note 8 Pro” just hours after the release of World of Warcraft Classic.
In two different colors, the logo of World of Warcraft can be seen – in red for the Horde on a black background and in blue for the Alliance on a white background. This has sparked discussions about whether WoW could also be released as a mobile version.
Inspired by: Lineage?
WoW Classic on the smartphone? For some players, the suspicion arises that WoW could be released as a mobile version. After all, the Classic variant requires comparatively little processing power and should be easily manageable by current smartphones.
However, the complexity of World of Warcraft with dozens of abilities per class argues against it. Whether it could really be implemented well is not so easy to answer.
In South Korea, the big, older PC MMORPGs Lineage and Lineage 2 have been extremely successful as mobile games in recent years. They provided the publisher NCSoft with great quarterly results and a lot of money.
That Blizzard is working on new mobile games is no longer a secret.
Blizzard sued a WoW knock-off: Coincidentally, Blizzard is currently involved in a legal dispute against a “rip off” of World of Warcraft.
The mobile game “Glorious Saga” has to deal with the accusation of having taken a large part of its game content directly from World of Warcraft. Many character designs are not only similar to those of Blizzard but completely identical. For instance, there is a Gul’dan leading the orc Horde or a “King Wrynn” from Stormwind.
Whether World of Warcraft will actually get a mobile offshoot is of course still uncertain. However, the fact that Xiaomi apparently has the rights to use the official logo raises some questions. By the latest at BlizzCon 2019, in about 2 months, there should be certainty on this topic.
What would be an alternative? One thing is certain: Blizzard is developing further mobile games.
It might be that Blizzard does not make the MMORPG WoW into a mobile game but rather a real-time strategy game that uses characters from Warcraft. There has already been a “Pokémon GO” version with Warcraft characters in discussion.
Would you give a “Mobile-WoW” a chance? Or should such a thing not even exist?
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