Financing Dispute: Blizzard stops the mobile game World of Warcraft

In addition to Diablo Immortal and Warcraft Arclight Rumble, the online role-playing game World of Warcraft should also have a suitable mobile offshoot. Now the plans at Blizzard and the Chinese developer NetEase seem to be falling apart.

They argue about funding. After three years of development, the World of Warcraft smartphone game is being discontinued and a team of more than 100 NetEase developers is being disbanded. The news agency reports Bloomberg referring to their often trusted sources. The reason for the shutdown of the project, codenamed “Neptune”, is said to have been disputes over the financial terms between Activision Blizzard and the Chinese partner.

Dragonflight and WotLK should fix it this year

The discontinued mobile offshoot of the online role-playing game shouldn’t start out as a direct WoW copy, but as an MMORPG in the same universe. With plans on the table, Blizzard should focus on developing the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion “Dragonflight” in the future and will launch the second WoW Classic add-on “Wrath of the Lich King” at the end of September.

On smartphones, the focus will be on the financially successful Diablo Immortal and Warcraft Arclight Rumble. Even 17 years after the launch of the base version, World of Warcraft continues to play a vital financial role for Activision Blizzard. To date, a total of eight expansions have been released and nostalgics have been tempted to reactivate their subscription with WoW Classic.

However, the company does not allow accurate insight into the statistics. Nearly 5.5 million paid subscribers were last confirmed in November 2015. However, the highest level was reached in the third and fourth quarters of 2010 with 12 million active players.