Warcraft Mobile is taking its time, and the game has reportedly been in development for 4 years. Why hasn’t anything come out yet?
Many players assumed that Blizzard would finally announce the first Warcraft Mobile at BlizzConline 2021. After all, the rumor has been in the air for a long time. During an earning call, Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, stated that such games are already “in an advanced state of development”.
But nothing was shown at BlizzCon. How long has Blizzard really been working on it?
3D artist reveals rough development time: A few more specific details came through a tweet from Clayton Chod. He is a 3D artist at Blizzard and linked a job posting, to which he also revealed a bit about the current project:
We have updated the description for our job posting in ‘Environment Art’. We are indeed working on a Warcraft Mobile game. I have been working on it for as long as I’ve been at Blizzard and it’s truly a fantastic team!
This not only officially confirms a “Warcraft Mobile” by a Blizzard employee, but it also allows for some conclusions about the development time.
If you look at Clayton Chod’s LinkedIn profile, you can see that he has been with Blizzard since July 2016. Assuming he was moved to the mobile team soon after, Warcraft Mobile has likely been in development since early to mid-2017. That would mean it has been 4 years now, which is quite a long time for a mobile game.
Why was nothing shown at BlizzCon? Unfortunately, one can only speculate about that. Perhaps the game is not yet presentable, or the development has, like in almost all areas, been significantly delayed due to the Corona pandemic. After all, this is likely to have caused delays with the new WoW patch as well.
In any case, Blizzard should be aware that they primarily need to convince a group of PC players. Perhaps that is why Warcraft Mobile, unlike Overwatch 2 or Diablo 4, has not yet been shown in an early state.
Blizzard may want to ensure that the material presented is already of high quality and thus has a chance to convince skeptical PC players. This can only happen if development is already well advanced.
When we will finally receive concrete information about a Warcraft Mobile remains unknown. Perhaps we will all have to wait another year, and then there will be news at BlizzCon 2022.
What do you expect from a Warcraft Mobile? What genre should the game be, and what should it be able to do?
Even WoW players still have to wait a while – the next update 9.1 is still a long way off.
