The reactions to Diablo Immortal are intense. For Blizzard, even more intense than expected.
What happened? Since Diablo Immortal was announced at BlizzCon 2018, there has been increasing criticism of Blizzard and the way the game was presented. According to Blizzard, an intense reaction was anticipated, but not to this extent.
The controversy escalates
How are fans reacting? After the announcement of Diablo Immortal, many fans expressed their anger on social media, on reddit, or at BlizzCon itself. In the initial reactions, they
- asked if Diablo Immortal was an April Fool’s joke
- claimed Diablo Immortal is a copy of existing mobile games
- and repeatedly created topics on reddit that reflected their anger.
Meanwhile, the controversy is becoming more intense. Fans justify insulting Blizzard employees (via reddit), attacking journalists (via reddit) who disagree with them, and even started a petition (via battle.net) to stop Diablo Immortal.
The controversy is larger than expected: Blizzard has already responded to the criticism in an interview. In a conversation with US site Kotaku, further impressions from Blizzard emerged.
According to Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham, emotional reactions of this kind were expected, but “not to this degree.” They know that the audience consists of passionate PC and console gamers.
“We have seen something like this before. We observed a similar reaction when we announced Diablo for consoles or Hearthstone. We knew that people were desperate to see or hear about that one thing,” said Adham.
The appeasement backfired: For this reason, Blizzard wrote a blog post shortly before BlizzCon, in which hopes for Diablo 4 were to be dispelled.
According to Kotaku, this was written in a way that companies like to skirt around an issue.
With the knowledge of typical PR speak, it could be inferred from the blog post that nothing major would be coming.
However, it had the exact opposite effect on passionate fans. Nowhere is it explicitly ruled out that “the next big Diablo thing” would be coming at BlizzCon. For many fans, that was likely enough of a hint for further hope.
It went as well as it could: In further conversations, Adham believes that his team handled the situation as well as possible:
We tried to get ahead of things with the blog post and let people know that we are working on several things.
At Blizzard, we don’t announce things until we’re ready. It’s about the quality of the game, less about timing. The most important thing is to provide an overwhelming experience for players.
In further conversations, Adham reiterated that multiple teams are working on multiple projects and that he hopes hardcore fans will play and love Diablo Immortal.
The guiding principle is always to deliver amazing games of overwhelming value to players, regardless of genre and platform. Adham also understands the feelings of the community and wishes he could say more about the other Diablo projects.
The community cannot understand this: In particular, the points regarding quality have already upset the community beforehand. On reddit, fans complain about this very point:
Blizzard used to cancel games like Ghost and Titan because they did not meet Blizzard quality. Now they outsource games and just give them a new skin. I’m not sad, I’m disappointed and angry.
Furthermore, fans feel abandoned. In many posts, members assert that Blizzard built its foundation on loyal PC fans and is now abandoning them because there is more to gain on mobile.
Even if many fans are offended, our author Schuhmann believes that Diablo Immortal shows how confident Blizzard is.
