A Warcraft mobile MMO from Blizzard and NetEase is reportedly canceled after three years of development.
This spinoff project, codenamed Neptune, was a mobile MMO World of Warcraft spin-off that took place during a different time period. Blizzard and NetEase scrapped it due to an unspecified financial disagreement This news comes by way of a Bloomberg report, citing people familiar with the game’s development. Bloomberg reached out to NetEase and Activision Blizzard for comment on the project’s status, but neither company chose to comment on the matter.
NetEase, a massive Chinese company that publishes and funds many video game projects — including the recent Diablo Immortal mobile game — reportedly disbanded a team of over 100 developers that were working on the unannounced Warcraft mobile MMO. According to Bloomberg, NetEase did not transfer most of the developers elsewhere within the company.
As Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier explained, this isn’t the first time Blizzard has canceled a Warcraft mobile game. The company had also been working on a Warcraft mobile game similar to Pokémon GO but canceled it after four years of development. As Schreier notes, both of these canceled Warcraft mobile games had much longer development cycles than most mobile games. Another Warcraft mobile game, titled Warcraft Arclight Rumble, is announced and still in the work for iOS and Android.
Activision Blizzard is consistently making headlines throughout 2022, most notably due to Microsoft’s planned $68.7 billion acquisition of the company. This will certainly have an impact on future projects, as well as games currently in development across Activision Blizzard.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.