Blizzard are working on a new mobile game, according to a recent job posting. We’re letting you know anyway, because anything they make is almost certain to come to PC – every Blizzard game is available on our platform, including Hearthstone, their one foray into mobile so far.
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The vacancy is for a software engineer “to contribute to Blizzard’s mobile gaming efforts” by creating development tools for designers and artists to use. “Experience developing mobile games” is listed as a plus, and the vacancy is within Blizzard’s Incubation department (that’s where they develop new projects, and is managed by the recently-rehired co-founder Allen Adham).
Blizzard is undergoing a bit of a changing of the guard right now, with Adham’s hiring and several prominent staff being moved off their games for various unannounced projects. We know one of these is a new first-person title, and that the Diablo team is expanding.
As user Nirolak points out on NeoGAF, neither the first-person game nor a possible Diablo game are likely to be mobile titles. Speaking to VentureBeatlast February, Blizzard co-founder and chief development officer Frank Pearce said he thinks both the StarCraft and Overwatch franchises “would potentially lend themselves” to mobile.
With Overwatch’s rampant success and the possibility that the first-person title will be StarCraft-related (StarCraft II’s lead gameplay designer is one of the staff that was recently moved, and a third-person StarCraft shooter alreadynearly happened), Nirolak’s guess that the mobile game will be based on Overwatch is probably the fairest that can currently be made.
What with all the rumblings within Blizzard, it’s getting to the point where I’d like an announcement soon, please. They seldom announce anything of consequence at E3, though, so the earliest we’re likely to hear anything new is Gamescom, or a random bulletin of their own that could come at any time.
Hngh, and so on.