Clueless people here think the decision comes from Blizzard when it obviously comes from Microsoft as a new strategy to leverage its new IPs. The other clue is that no Blizzard dev is involved for now.People jump to the "mobile games" conclusion because of a 2018 quote but the games won't be mobile if they're AA. AA is an awesome space in the gaming industry that has great potential and has tons of dumb fun games. The notion of mobile game is blurry anyway since AAA games are released on Iphones now.. and Blizzard already has made mobile games..Whether it is a good or bad news will depend on the quality of the games that will be made. At the very least, everyone admits how underutilized Blizzard IPs are. If you care about Starcraft, you're gonna wait a very long time for a new game if you wait on Blizzard Ent. Might as well get a Starcraft spin-off game made by another team that makes a fresh, different and fun game.
I miss the days when WoW was the only priority. Starcraft, Diablo, Overwatch - just let them die. Warcraft is the future. We don't need anything else if it's not Warcraft-related.
Do you guys not have phones?
"In terms of Blizzard's approach to mobile gaming, many of us over the last few years have shifted from playing primarily desktop to playing many hours on mobile"Only a mild amount of trolling on their end.
Pet battle Pokemongo style.
You know what? There's a possibility here for blizz to do the unthinkable. Make me a single player game like Overwatch was supposed to be. Project Titan. I want to be a character from WoW Lore and play through their story instead of reading a book about it. Let me be Broxigar. Let me be Kelegos. Let me play as Anduin Lothar. Maybe do a single player version of Arthas' story? Or show me the troll wars. The war of the sands. The black empire. Let me be Gul'dan corrupting the Orcs. Could be amazing. Or just make a crappy cash-grab mobile game people will play once for the bonuses they get from the other games and never tough again. You know, like Rumble.
They will make games where the money is being made and mobile gaming brings in a ton. They won't leave PC or Console as they are both still big money generators but from their standpoint, the business side, it would be stupid not to invest in mobile games. The Blizzard that we know and love was a PC focused company, but that company has long died. Now it's a massive studio, one of the biggest if not the biggest under the Microsoft (Xbox) banner.PC gaming brought in around $40Bn in 2023, the same year mobile gaming brought in $90Bn, which equalled a 49% share of the gaming market.Mobile gaming will be a big focus for Xbox + Activison Blizzard King in the coming years. In-app purchases, in-app ads (imagine wow having pop up ads every time you open up the map, or the loading screens play a 30sec clip then you have to find the small X to close it) and subscriptions are the biggest reasons for mobile gaming. Many mobile games also track where you press/swipe your fingers so they can better design the UI for it to be in your face and to eliminate points of friction.Absolutely would I much prefer Blizzard to invest 100% of their time on PC games like WoW, and while they have implemented some ideas such as Plunderstorm, MoP:Remix and the Classics, I would much like them to have fully fleshed out the core WoW game with bug fixes, better story and systems along with worthy patches, instead of timed events, this of course is subjective.However, this is not the Blizzard of past, it's not the Blizzard that made Warcraft and World of Warcraft back in 2004 up until Cata when Activison got involved and you could argue was the beginning of WoWs downfall. Moreover, the world we live in today is vastly different. More and more people are playing games on various devices, and streaming has become a significant part of gaming since Twitch launched in 2011 (although streaming existed in the 1990s, it wasn’t used for gaming). Nowadays, everyone has a device in their pocket capable of playing games, whether they’re on public transport, waiting in line, driving (idiot) or even in the restroom, people could be spending money on games.While I don't personally play mobile games as I am sure many of you that dislike this idea don't either, the numbers don't lie. They never have nor ever will care about your feelings, they care about numbers and the numbers are showing the mobile market growing YoY, their focus is to please the shareholders.It is sad that this is happening, but there's nothing we can do about it, we can only hope that the time they do spend on PC development is worthy of our time being spent playing those games. It shall be interesting to see the split of these AA games across mobile, console and PC. In one pocket you have your wallet/money and in the other a device to spend it.
Campaign packs for Starcraft 2 plz!