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Hearthstone User Interface

Blizzard threw a curve ball at PAX East in Boston this weekend by announcing Heathstone, a mobile-friendly collectible card game based on the popular Warcraft franchise.  While there appears to be a fair bit of reaction ranging from disappointed indifference to outright rage that Blizzard would divert resources away from big-name titles, I think this criticism is unfounded given Blizzard’s tendency over the years of taking popular genres and polishing them.  And from what we’ve seen so far, and from having just spent dozens of hours traveling to and from New Zealand,  I can safely say Hearthstone would have been installed on my tablet if it were an option.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect Hearthstone to become my game of choice, but I think that’s part of the point: when can anyone say they were really blown away by a mobile game? Mobile games are as much a necessity in this day and age as traveling with a snack in your bag. It’s not that you necessarily want to eat the snack over actually getting a meal, but from time to time it’s necessary and expedient to do so. It makes sense that Blizzard would prefer people choose their version of the gaming meal-replacement bar over others. And just as I prefer Cliff bars over Power Bars for my travel snacks, I expect I’ll prefer Hearthstone over many of the other free-to-play games on the market.

The lack of information about an Android release for Hearthstone does surprise me, though.  The Android user base continues to grow at pretty impressive rates.  While it’s certainly more challenging and resource intensive to port a game like this to Android given the variability of devices and versions, I would have expected at least some projected timeline for those of us not on board the Apple train given Blizzard’s size. I’m interested in Hearthstone, but not enough to play it on PC or to go out and buy an iPad.  I doubt I’m the only one in this boat and hopefully someone at Blizzard will figure that out sooner rather than later.

For those who want to know more about the game, MMO-Champion has a great roll-up on what’s known at this time.