A sarcastic round of applause for Activision Blizzard and Chinese tech giant NetEase…

Activision Blizzard and NetEase have had a strong relationship for years. Just think, for example, of the financially unimaginable success of Diablo Immortal, which is available on iOS, Android and PC but is not exactly beloved by gamers. That wasn’t the only tango between the two companies, as Bloomberg reports that behind the scenes, the US publisher (soon to be potentially acquired by Microsoft) and the Chinese tech company have already scrapped an unannounced mobile World of Warcraft MMO…

NetEase had 100 people working on the project. Some of them have since been fired, but we don’t know how many people at Blizzard were working on the MMO or how many layoffs there may have been. The game was codenamed Neptune and would not have been a simple port, so the mobile World of Warcraft MMO would not have been the same as the PC release. Instead, it would have been a spinoff set in a different historical period for the Activision Blizzard-NetEase duo.

The cancellation of Neptune was not the result of a decision made for creative reasons but because there was no agreement between the two parties on the terms. It could spell trouble for Activision Blizzard (and Microsoft in the future), as NetEase is the Chinese publisher of the company’s games. It hasn’t happened yet with Diablo Immortal, as the game’s one of the official Chinese social media accounts allegedly made a reference to Xi Jinping (China’s leader) as Winnie the Pooh (something that is not tolerated by the censors there), which could cause tensions between the two companies. It could lead to some repercussions for the Bobby Kotick-led publisher.

The question is how a mobile World of Warcraft MMO would have been received. As with Diablo, a mainly PC franchise leapt mobile, and fans were rightly banging the table there too…

Source: WCCFTech