While Blizzard Entertainment’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game World Of Warcraft has sold like gangbusters on PC, it’s yet to make the jump to home consoles.
Released back in 2004, the fourth iteration in the Warcraft series is undoubtedly one of the most popular games of all time. Put it this way: just three years ago, it had over 100 million registered accounts, which made the US-based company a staggering $9.23 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing video game franchises of all time.
So, with that in mind, why hasn’t the uber popular MMO launched on home consoles? Well, according to a brand new piece of intel, it looks like this could potentially be on the cards at some point in the future. A new datamining effort has discovered a few interesting details hidden within the code of World of Warcraft, with well-known dataminer Martin Benjamins pointing out on Twitter that a snippet of new game code has multiple strings that make mention of controller support. Obviously, these new findings soon sent the whole World Of Warcraft community into meltdown, prompting Blizzard to finally issue a statement on it.
The company’s community manager, Randy “Kaivax” Jordan, had this to say over on the game’s forums:
For a long time, we’ve seen a small number of players turn to 3rd party addons, such as Console Port 17, in order to work through certain accessibility issues.
We always want to make WoW more widely accessible, if possible, so in Shadowlands, we’re attempting to add some support for keybinds, camera, and turning a character on controllers such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
We’re glad that the community has felt empowered to make addons tailored to specific needs like this, and we’re going to continue to encourage that as best we can.
What’s really interesting, though, is that hidden within the code are the specific mention of PS4, and even PS5, suggesting that World Of Warcraft could be finally coming to PlayStation consoles at some point in future. On the other hand, it’s very possible that these strings are a result of a Battle.net SDK import, and don’t actually hint at PS4 and PS5 ports of the game.
Strings found by @bloerwald:
WTFhttps://t.co/SqClitJ6IU
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 4 Pro
PlayStation 5Take with a grain of salt, this does not show usage. Could be part of a https://t.co/01M2rAuxqt SDK import or something but the DefaultGamePadBindings file makes me go 🤔
— Martin (@Marlamin) April 8, 2020
Long story short, take these new tidbits with a big grain of salt, but there’s definitely a good possibility that the super popular MMORPG may be secretly coming to home consoles sometime down the line.
But what say you? Would you be up for playing World Of Warcraft on your PS4 or PS5? Or should the beloved fantasy franchise just stick to PC? Grab your enchanted longswords and venture into the dark caverns of the comments section below to let us know.