World of Warcraft still not coming to consoles, Blizzard shoots down rumors once again

World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas once again confirms the MMORPG won't be coming to consoles any time soon.

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WoW's upcoming Midnight expansion has proven to be somewhat controversial among fans, what with the expansion's limiting of helpful add-on tools and simplifying classes. Some enthusiasts believe the new changes are the beginning of Blizzard essentially "casual-izing" the hardcore MMORPG aspects of the game in the bid of reaching more players. This intuition led fans to suspect Blizzard's motives with Midnight are to pave the way for a console launch, which would theoretically open WoW up to millions of new users.

That's not happening. In a recent interview with the Unshackled Fury podcast, World of Warcraft senior game director Ion Hazzikostas was asked if it is Blizzard's intent to use Midnight as an on-ramp for a Game Pass launch, or perhaps a console release: "It is not."

• Read more: World of Warcraft: Midnight expansion release date is March 2, 2026 - player housing inbound
• Read more: World of Warcraft's new second paid currency can be spent on Midnight custom housing

Hazzikostas continues, saying that Blizzard has no reason to withhold this kind of vital information:

"To be fully transparent, there is no reason for us to hide anything about this. If we were actively working towards bringing World of Warcraft to consoles or a bunch of other platforms, we'd be saying: 'we're actively working towards this. We know have a lot of work to do but it's a place where we want to land.' Our focus remains, right now, on the PC-based experience.

"I think a lot of these changes, as a package, are about broad approachability. World of Warcraft is an incredibly complex game, and as much as I know there are members of the community that celebrate the complexity, I think there's a big difference in having a very high skill ceiling for a game, having a tremendous amount of depth, and just having complexity.

"I think our goal has always been, Blizzard's goals have always been with all of our games, to have them be easy to learn and nearly impossible to master. I think a lot of our changes in World of Warcraft, in Midnight, are aimed at improving the easy-to-learn side of that spectrum, I think the skill ceiling in this game is still going to be incredibly high.

"You're going to see people who have been pro-level PVPers, people who have been running MDI, people who have been topping the leaderboards in mythic class crushing the race to world first--the same people are going to be coming out on top in this world. There will be countless challenges for them to tackle as they try to approach perfection.

"Really, we've been talking about this for a year now philosophically, this is us kind of stepping back and taking stock of the state of the game, what's required to play it well, what's required to play it now at even a kind of baseline level for the community at endgame. A normal or heroic raiding guild is expecting you to know or to have installed or to do what an average mythic plus pug is expecting of you, and making sure those expectations are reasonable."