Blizzard has just dashed your (my) dreams of playing the collectible-card game Hearthstone on your (my) Nexus 5 over the gift-giving holidays to help you (me) ignore your (my) family.
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft now won’t make the leap to Android phones and iPhone until early next year, according to a blog post on Blizzard’s website. You can play the popular card battler on PC, Mac, and iPad, and the company said from the beginning that iPhone and Android would get a version in the second half of 2014. While the phones will have to wait for a smaller take on Hearthstone, Android tablets could still get the game soon. Hearthstone is the 53rd highest-grossing iPad game in the United States, and a release on more platforms should give it a boost as it brings in more players.
“We’re taking things one step at a time,” Hearthstone community manager Christina “Zeriyah” Sims wrote. “We’ve got our sights set on a release for Android tablets, our next new platform, before the end of the year. We’ve just got a few more mana crystals to polish and some Angry Chickens to chase down.”
Blizzard says that it is also close to finishing the game for the smaller smartphone screens but that it wants more time to ensure that it gets everything right.
“While we have a build up and running internally, it needs a bit more work,” wrote Sims. “We don’t feel like we’ll be ready to share it with you until early next year. It’s very important to us that the phone experience for Hearthstone is just as accessible as the tablet and PC versions.”
The big problem is that Hearthstone simply works better on a bigger scree, where you can read the text and see everything that is going on. That won’t really translate well to 4 inches to 6 inches of display real estate. Blizzard did confirm that it is changing the interface to make it work on phones.
“Releasing Hearthstone on iPhone and Android phones is something we’re incredibly excited about,” said Sims. “But ultimately, we’d rather take the extra time to make Hearthstone’s user interface on the phone customized to feel great for the platform, rather than a port that doesn’t taken into account the limitations of a smaller screen.”