Goodbye augmented-reality Thrall. A Pokémon Go Warcraft game is now but a pipedream.
WoW Wednesday: Pokémon Go Warcraft is No More
Written by Ollie Bradley at 05/11/2022, 05:08 AM
For those who are partial to a bit of mobile gaming, last week's announcement of Warcraft: Arclight Rumble would have been music to their ears. Or eyes. And there's no doubt we haven't seen the last of Warcraft's mobile adventures. But there's one concept that we can officially put to bed after years of speculation.
Pokémon Go is one of the biggest mobile games on the market, consistently banking more and more moolah than most other mobile powerhouses including the gacha-based Genshin Impact and even the gargantuan Candy Crush Saga and Clash games.
It's no surprise, then, that Blizzard was quick to start work on their own money-spinning 'tribute' to the augmented reality game king way back in 2018. Exactly how an augmented reality Warcraft game would look is anyone's guess. But they can keep guessing forevermore, as it has been confirmed that the Pokémon Go** Warcraft** project has been canceled.
The cancellation was confirmed by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier on Twitter, who received information after 'asking around' that the project was dropped by Blizzard earlier this year.
This isn't all that surprising, given that we haven't heard a peep about the project since it was first reported four years ago. Not only that, but when Blizzard's big mobile game announcement last week was confirmed to not be the Pokémon Go Warcraft hybrid, the writing was on the wall.
And that's probably a good thing. Pokémon is made for the augmented reality genre (or vice versa), and fulfills the childhood dreams of Pokémon fans everywhere by bringing the collectible monsters into the real world and having us live our Pokémon trainer fantasies. The multiple attempts to shoehorn other IPs into the same space, meanwhile, have been somewhat tragic. And (mostly) decidedly unsuccessful.
Blizzard likely saw these failed attempts and figured they would quit while they're ahead. And for our money, we'd say that the Clash Royale -like Arclight Rumble was a far more apt and lucrative direction for them to go in.