Where Art Thou Eastern Red Shirt Diablo Man?
It's remarkable how long Blizzard has avoided the obvious. Cross-play has matured across genres. Diablo Immortal is looking north of $250m lifetime between China and US iOS alone, and even bolted on a PC client. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft - arguably the most durable live-service in history - still lives a lonely PC life. No mobile SKU, no cross platform, and no F2P (WoW tokens are for another day). Giving this franchise to NetEase to launch a Chinese-specific mobile SKU is the most obvious play in history, besides maybe porting League of Legends to mobile. Yet arrogance always seems to get in the way of player empathy.
A decade ago, you could argue that the technology wasn't ready. Maybe. Westward Journey Mobile launched in 2015, while the initial PC version launched in 2001. There's no technical barrier to putting World of Warcraft on mobile. Diablo Immortal proved the other bits: outsource the mobile build, regionalize the monetization, and preserve the "sanctity" of the Western-facing product by pointing critics toward selective outrage. It's the cleanest form of plausible deniability this industry has ever invented, just as Amazon did the opposite for Lost Ark.
Which makes Blizzard's refusal even stranger. The studio still behaves as if the IP is too sacred to risk translation, the same mistake Riot made when it convinced itself League of Legends couldn't work on mobile. Tencent solved that argument by creating Honor of Kings and birthing one of the largest entertainment properties on earth. When a partner fills the void you refuse to enter, that's not stewardship; it's self-inflicted irrelevance.
By sitting out, Blizzard has allowed every Eastern MMO to blossom uncontested. Black Desert, Lineage, Moonlight Blade, and now Where Winds Meet; pick your example! All of them ate the lunch WoW left on the table. This is a kind of IP narcissism. A belief that the brand is too refined to mingle with the devices and monetization frameworks the rest of the world uses daily.
The market doesn't care about that insecurity. Millions (billions?) of Eastern players have already voted for mobile-first MMORPGs, cross-platform, and monetization calibrated to regional norms. Blizzard could have owned this space. Instead, it's repeating the same pattern: protecting their idea of World of Warcraft, rather than delivering it to the people who still want it.
What's needed right now is an inverse Diablo red-shirt guy - the Eastern player who stands up at BlizzCon and says, "Where the fuck is my MMO?"
If Diablo Immortal proved anything, it's that Blizzard knows how to do this: ship it to NetEase, and move on. The cost of failing to do so is that it has lost much of its autonomy and has had to contend with the dearth of product managers. Just self-inflicted wound after self-inflicted wound, and yet at any point, Blizzard can choose to opt out of this. All it takes is the will to serve players.