Blizzard has explained why Warcraft-based collectible card game, Hearthstone, still isn’t available on console, 12 years after release. The game is available on handheld devices like tablets and mobile, but has never made the jump to the likes of Switch 2 or Steam Deck. In explaining its thinking, the developer suggested that belonging to Microsoft and Xbox means these console conversions are now more of a priority than ever.
“There’s a level of investment that we need to make to make that happen,” explained Hearthstone executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith during a group interview I was a part of at Blizzard recently, “primarily in terms of UI and UX and making sure that it’s very natural to go and play a card game on those platforms. I know it’s possible – Duels of the Planeswalkers for Magic [The Gathering], many years ago now, was absolutely delightful with the controller – so I know we can do it.
“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.”
Hearthstone was quickly ported to mobile in 2015, a year after a release, mostly because Blizzard recognised an opportunity there and rushed to fill it, Lyons-Smith said. “We ported that thing to get fast to market and a whole lot more players showed and so it was the right strategic choice at that time,” he said. But the Hearthstone codebase is old now, and the quality bar is high on consoles and handheld console machines.
“I asked an engineer who’d been on the project a long time and he estimates the code is 16 years old,” Lyons-Smith said, “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
Game director Tyler Bielman echoed that sentiment by saying, “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.”
Lyons-Smith added: “So let’s get there and let’s do it right and we’ll find the right time to do it.”
It was to a follow-up question asked after this that Lyons-Smith made the remark about owner Microsoft being keen to get games on as many platforms as possible. “In the future as we explore console and handheld, we’d probably go as wide as we could,” he said. “Certainly we have a different owner now than we did three years ago and they’re more invested in Xbox and ‘anything’s an Xbox’. Their high-level goal [being] games playable anywhere.”
Play Anywhere is one of Microsoft’s key ideas as it transitions Xbox away from hardware and more towards being a platform-agnostic gaming brand. The idea is that you buy a game once to play on multiple platforms – wherever houses an Xbox ecosystem or app. Last year’s expensive Asus Rog Ally X handheld device was and is a key proponent of this.
Blizzard has just announced a Cataclysm themed expansion for Hearthstone that will launch on 17th March. It’ll bring a whole new story to the game as well as reintroduce Colossal cards, which are play-space-filling brutes, and new keywords, funky mechanics, and more. Blizzard is also teasing a major Hearthstone announcement for BlizzCon 2026, though as I discovered, this will not be Hearthstone 2.