Blizzard Cancels Warcraft for Mobile

Citing an anonymous source familiar with the matter, Bloomberg is reporting that Activision Blizzard and NetEase have cancelled a World of Warcraft mobile game that had been in development for nearly 3 years.

Hangzhou, China-based NetEase publishes World of Warcraft and other Blizzard franchises in the country and is also a co-creator of the recently released Diablo Immortal.

The source said that NetEase has disbanded a team of more than 100 developers tasked with creating content for the game. The two companies disagreed over terms and ultimately scrapped the project.

Warcraft coming to phones this year – wonder if we’ll finally see that Warcraft Pokemon Go game pic.twitter.com/j6DJQmWN3l

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier)

February 3, 2022

Code-named Neptune, the now-canceled title was envisioned as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the same universe as World of Warcraft.

A person familiar with the project noted that it wouldn’t have been a direct translation of the popular online game but a spinoff set during a different time period.

Blizzard’s mobile initiatives have not all been successful. The company also canceled another Warcraft-based project, an augmented-reality game similar to Pokémon GO, Bloomberg News has reported. That game, code-named Orbis, had been in development for more than four years.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and remains one of the biggest revenue generators for Activision Blizzard and NetEase.