Blizzard Is Reportedly Developing a 'Warcraft' Version of 'Pokemon Go'

Blizzard is developing a Warcraft mobile game that's structured in the form of Pokemon Go, a new report suggests.

Picking apart the history of Blizzard's Diablo series and where it's at now as well as where it's going, Kotaku spoke to several different developers familiar with Blizzard's projects and plans for future games. Within those discussions, the topic of mobile games came up in lieu of Blizzard's reveal of Diablo Immortal, a game which brought on a wave of controversy for being a mobile-only Diablo game that Blizzard announced to cap its BlizzCon 2018 opening ceremony.

A current developer within Blizzard told Kotaku that "there are lots of mobile game players at Blizzard" and multiple developers within the company said they were big on playing Pokemon Go, the game that uses AR technology to drop Pokemon into real-world settings for players to catch. With that in mind, Kotaku's report stated that a "natural extension" of that was for a team of Blizzard developers to create a mobile Warcraft game.

"The natural extension of that was for one of Blizzard's incubation teams to develop a Warcraft version of Pokémon Go, which is in development for smartphones now," Kotaku's report stated.

Kotaku attributed the drive to make a mobile Warcraft game in the shape of Pokemon Go to the idea of how much revenue it could potentially bring in – Pokemon Go itself brought in millions of dollars a day earlier in the year – but also said it's because lead designer Cory Stockton who worked on World of Warcraft is a huge fan of the Pokemon franchise.

As for Blizzard's gameplay plans for the mobile Warcraft game, Kotaku said those who have already played the game internally said it has more to it than just Pokemon Go features. The report stated the game also has single-player mechanics, though the report didn't go into detail about what those might be.

Blizzard has said in the past that it's been a "dream" to bring the Diablo series to mobile, and with other announcements from the developer declaring that it's creating mobile games for multiple franchises, it should only be mildly surprising at this point that a mobile Warcraft game is in the works. The fact that it's essentially a mobile version of Pokemon Go is a notable and likely unexpected detail though, so it'll be interesting to see how the reported development of the game proceeds.

Kotaku's report also suggested that a second expansion for Diablo III was cancelled and potentially impacted Diablo IV, a game that wasn't announced at BlizzCon 2018 perhaps because of another cancelled Blizzard project.

[via Kotaku]