World of Tanks: Blitz brings its mobile armored battles to Steam

The new circle of life is a developer making a PC game, porting it to mobile, and then bringing that port back to PC. I can hear Elton John singing about it in my head.

Publisher Wargaming is bringing its World of Tanks: Blitz app to the Steam PC gaming platform today. This is separate from the free-to-play World of Tanks that is already available for PC. Blitz, instead, takes the tank-versus-tank combat of the original and makes it work on touchscreen mobile devices. Only, now that it’s on Steam, Wargaming is adapting the touch version for the keyboard-and-mouse all over again. World of Tanks is already one of the top-10 performing free-to-play PC games in the world, and Blitz could expand its reach even further.

You actually could play World of Tanks: Blitz on a PC for a while now — you just had to get it through the Windows 10 store. I just assumed that was for people with mobile Microsoft devices like the Surface and other convertible tablets. With the game on Steam, Wargaming clearly wants to bring in PC players using a mouse and keyboard.

“With the game already available on Windows, Google, and Apple stores, Steam was a natural step,” World of Tanks: Blitz product director Andrey Ryabovol said in a statement. “We want to give our players freedom when choosing where, when, and through which channels they want to play World of Tanks Blitz. We’d like to welcome our new players and encourage everyone to join in and have fun battling across iOS, Android, Mac OS X, and Windows devices.”

While this might seem like Wargaming is taking a risk of splitting its audience, chances are that Blitz should appeal to players with underpowered gaming rigs. While World of Tanks proper does not require top-of-the-line processing, Blitz should run on even weaker machines. This opens the game up to even more players around the world who may not have the means to afford much more than the most bare-bones system.