Although there is plenty of demand from the community to bring Hearthstone to home consoles, Blizzard has some compelling reasons why the game is stuck on PC, tablets, and mobile devices at the moment.
Hearthstone’s original code is 16-Years old
Hearthstone originally launched all the way back in 2014 and the game has been a major success story for Blizzard. The card game, inspired by World of Warcraft lore, offers players fast games and multiple formats that provide a little bit of something for everyone. Although the playerbase has been able to enjoy the game on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices for more than a decade, Blizzard still has some concerns about about porting it to consoles.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith explained that the game’s aging source code is a real blocker for making an optimized living room console experience for Hearthstone players.
“I asked an engineer who’d been on the project a long time and he estimates the code is 16 years old and the team was 15 people 16 years ago. And so there’s more of an effort to go: ‘I want to make sure when we go that it’s awesome.’ That it doesn’t just feel like, yeah, they ported it here and you can play… I want to make sure that when we go, we’re going to go and it’s going to feel awesome for players that love that form factor, whether they’re leaning back on the couch or sitting on the couch with their handheld.”
Hearthstone game director Tyler Bielman added, “If we’re going to bring it specifically to that living room big screen platform, we would want to make sure that the full experience is optimised for that mode that you’re in.”
Is there a demand for Hearthstone on consoleS?
Additionally, the team wants to make sure that there would actually be enough demand for that play experience to justify the investment of the port. “It’s a matter of are there enough players there wanting that beyond who’s going to pull out their phone or their tablet to play? It’s been so exciting seeing that segment of the market grow such that we can then say, yeah, actually, let’s go and do this.”
There’s no denying that Hearthstone on Switch or the ROG Xbox Ally would likely be a very comfortable gaming experience. With Blizzard under the Microsoft umbrella these days, it’s also possible that there could be a desire to get the game on Xbox to be another piece of evidence that Xbox gamers can play anywhere.
Hearthstone is available now on PC and select mobile devices.
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