A big investigative report on "the past, present, and future of Diablo" went up today on Kotaku, digging into the development history of Diablo 4 and also the state of things at Blizzard. It was presumably spurred by the backlash against Diablo Immortal, a mobile game announced—to great derision—at Blizzcon. And hidden in its midst is a reference to another mobile game in the works, based on a different Blizzard game that you may have heard of: Warcraft.
Diablo devotees were disappointed by the Immortal announcement, but a source told Kotaku that Blizzard employees are generally very enthusiastic about it, and about mobile games in general. "The reaction inside the company to Immortal is very different than the reaction outside the company," the source said. "Part of the thinking on a lot of these is, people want to work on smaller projects. Smaller projects in mobile tend to make sense."
Pokémon Go is particularly popular among staffers, and Blizzard's famous, massive Orc statue is a Pokéstop that sees a lot of action. And while I don't think it's the most obvious pairing of all time, someone decided to put the two of them together, and a Blizzard "incubation team" is now working on a Warcraft game styled after Pokémon Go.
That may not make Warcraft diehards happy, although Warcraft 3: Reforged and the ongoing success of World of Warcraft should soften the blow. But Blizzard has previously said that it's working on multiple mobile games across all of its properties, and it's easy to see why it would want to go in that direction: Analysis firm Superdata estimated in May (via Eurogamer) that Pokémon Go was making $104 million per month, and it's actually climbed two spots on Superdata's mobile game charts since then.
