Like other video game companies, employees at Activision's various studios have been forced to work remotely for the past several weeks due to the COVID-19 outbreak. During a post-earnings conference call today, company executives said that while the transition has been difficult, major releases are planned for this year, including the next Call of Duty game and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, which is expected to be released this year.

"The move to remote work brings complexity and challenges in several areas of the game development process, including creative collaboration, motion capture, voiceover work, localization, and quality assurance, but we have mitigations in place to address each of these areas We have mitigations in place to address each of these areas," said Daniel Alegre, Chief Operations Officer.

"Importantly, based on the work to date, we still expect to deliver a strong slate of content during the remainder of the year. This includes the next premium release of Call of Duty, two titles based on Activision's library IP, World of Warcraft, the Shadowlands expansion, regional testing of: the Shadowlands expansion, new mobile regional testing of titles, and ongoing live operations in key franchises.

Blizzard President J. Allen Brack was a bit more specific about the release goals for Shadowlands. Previous WoW expansions have often been released in July or August, so we had expected a summer release as well, but Brack said during the conference call that it will be released closer to the end of the year.

"Our team has done a really good job of shifting to telecommuting. We were able to welcome some players into the closed alpha of Shadowlands last month, and thanks to the team's hard work, Shadowlands is on track to launch in the fourth quarter of this year."

Interestingly, while Activision seems firmly committed to Call of Duty and Shadowlands, there was no mention of the other two big games we are looking forward to: overwatch 2 and Diablo 4. It is possible that either is one of the two "library IP" games mentioned by Alegre, but that would be a tremendous underestimation, and I can't imagine Blizzard would pass up the opportunity to mention them by name if they were in such a position.

Far more likely is that they are simply not in the 2020 picture. We know that "Diablo 4" is still very far away, and director Luis Barriga said during BlizzCon 2019 (which, believe it or not, was just six months ago), "It's not coming out soon, not even 'Blizzard soon'" - but, There was hope that "Overwatch 2" might be close: in January, an erroneous tweet from PlayStation Brazil indicated that it would be released this year.