Activision Blizzard said it doesn’t expect Overwatch 2 or Diablo 4 to launch at any point in 2021 during its 2020 earnings call today. A new Call of Duty title will be released this year in Q4, though.
The company is focused more on its strategy moving forward, including pushing its CoD-style blueprint to other franchises. This goal includes expanding into free-to-play markets, hitting multiple platforms, and “in-game” delivery of new content as a live-service model.
Mobile is a “critical part” of Activision Blizzard’s long-term strategy. The company plans to have an entry-level version of every key franchise in its portfolio available to mobile gamers.
Activision Blizzard also said it’s already working on a free-to-play game based on its Warcraft IP for mobile and is hiring aggressively to form more strong mobile development teams to work on projects outside of King, which will launch Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! next month.
This is being driven by the success of CoD as a whole with CoD: Mobile, which just recently launched in China, being downloaded 50 million times since Dec. 25 and the overall franchise seeing a 40-percent boost in sales.
“We are already seeing the impact of our growth initiatives for Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush, which we expect to again drive strong results in 2021,” Activision Blizzard said. “And at the same time, we are making significant progress against our development pipeline for other key intellectual properties, which we expect to fuel further growth in 2022 and beyond.”
As for Diablo, Diablo Immortal is set to launch later this year and has been running regional tests that have been favorably received.
Although Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 aren’t expected to be released this year, we’ll still likely see new pieces of content from both titles at BlizzCon Online, which will take place on Feb. 19 and 20.
