The Diablo Immortal Backlash Could Have Been Avoided

BlizzCon 2018 took place this past weekend and we got some pretty cool announcements. Ashe is coming to Overwatch, Warcraft III is getting an extremely impressive update with Warcraft III: Reforged, Heroes of the Storm is getting its first original character, and Hearthstone‘s final 2018 expansion is coming early next month. However, the internet was set ablaze with the reveal of Diablo Immortal, a mobile title that Blizzard is developing in partnership with NetEase.

The backlash was immediate and unlike anything I’ve ever seen for a Blizzard game announcement. During a live Q&A for the game, a BlizzCon attendee asked if the announcement was an “out of season April Fool’s joke,” and the majority of the crowd booed when Principal Designer Wyatt Cheng stated that there were no plans for a PC version of Immortal. The official YouTube uploads of the game’s cinematic and gameplay trailers have been downvoted into oblivion, and are sitting at a combined 27,000 likes/635,000 dislikes at the time of this writing.

We can assume that the Diablo team went back to work today and discussed what went wrong at BlizzCon. As someone who has played the series since the release of Diablo II, I’m not upset that Diablo Immortal exists. I played it on the show floor and found it to be pretty fun. It was simply announced in the wrong manner.

Something Really Special Needs to Close out a Blizzcon Opening Ceremony

I attended BlizzCon with some friends and we got up at 5:30 in the morning on Friday to be in line for the convention’s opening ceremony, which was scheduled to start at 11:00am. Five and a half hours is a long time to wait, but seating in the main hall is limited, and another friend of mine tweeted a picture of the line around 10:00pm the night before:

These diehard fans were waiting in line so early because big things are revealed at BlizzCon opening ceremonies, and aside from a few odd years, the final announcements have been pretty massive. Some past opening ceremonies have been close out by the announcement of practically every World of Warcraft expansion since Wrath of the Lich King, and the 2014 BlizzCon opening ceremony ended with the reveal of Overwatch, which was probably the biggest announcement in Blizzard’s history. It was the studio’s first new IP since the launch of StarCraft in 1998.

This year, after Hearthstone Creative Director Ben Thompson revealed the game’s Rastakhan’s Rumble expansion, he introduced Diablo Principal Designer Wyatt Cheng. As I sat in the crowd, the hall filled with excitement and applause when Cheng took the stage. Diablo was the only franchise that Blizzard hadn’t talked about yet, so this was sure to be a big deal. As soon as Cheng uttered the words “we wanna use mobile devices as the platform for a new Diablo game,” it felt like all of the air was sucked out of the room. The audience was stunned. According to my brother, who took a picture of me as we heard that phrase, I was wearing my disappointment on my face:

The news felt like a punch in the gut for me and most of the people in the hall, based on the conversations I overheard afterward. Mobile gaming is limited from a hardware standpoint when you compare it to PC and console gaming, and the platform has a huge problem with exploitative, microstransaction-laden business models. A Diablo mobile game, especially one that Blizzard isn’t doing the heavy lifting on, was not a big enough announcement to close out the BlizzCon opening ceremony.

Blizzard Starts the Hype Train and Attempts to Slow It Down

After Diablo was basically a no-show at BlizzCon 2017, fans of the franchise had big expectations this year. It had been four years since Diablo III: Reaper of Souls was released, and while the Rise of the Necromancer DLC was released last June, it only added a new playable class. Fans were ready for something more substantial.

In August, Blizzard released a YouTube video (seen below) in which Diablo Community Manager Brandy Camel announced that “multiple Diablo projects are in the works,” and some of them would be shown “later this year.” That video immediately set expectations for BlizzCon, which was a little under three months away. The Nintendo Switch port of Diablo III: Eternal Collection was announced a few days later, but Diablo fans still figured they’d see a big announcement at Blizzard’s annual convention.

Blizzard must have seen all kinds of theories of what would be revealed at BlizzCon online, because the studio released a blog post in mid-October that tempered expectations for Diablo announcements at the event. The post said that “We know what many of you are hoping for and we can only say that ‘good things come to those who wait,’ but evil things often take longer. We appreciate your patience as our teams work tirelessly to create nightmarish experiences worthy of the Lord of Terror.” After reading that post I assumed that the next core Diablo PC/console game would not be announced, but my mind instantly latched on to other possibilities. Could we see remasters of Diablo or Diablo II? Would the rumored Netflix animated series be announced? It never crossed my mind that BlizzCon’s big Diablo announcement would be for a mobile game, based on the indifference to the platform that seems to exist among diehard Blizzard fans. I saw many people mention it online, but it was always used as the punchline for a joke.

Other Ways to Announce the Game Existed

I have no doubt that Blizzard was very excited to announce Diablo’s expansion into the mobile space, but there were far more appropriate ways to reveal Diablo Immortal. After the opening ceremony ended, my friends and I discussed how Blizzard could have done things differently.

My idea was to announce the game at an entirely different event, such as PAX or gamescom. Blizzard announced Hearthstone at PAX East 2013, so this wouldn’t be completely new to them. The Warcraft-themed card game turned out to be a huge success, but I’d have to assume that the studio didn’t feel that it was a big enough announcement for BlizzCon at the time, and that logic certainly applies to Diablo Immortal as well. I also feel that the game would have been a nice surprise at Apple’s iPhone event in September. No one would have expected any type of Diablo announcement there, and doing it away from BlizzCon would have reinforced that Immortal is a supplemental product for the franchise, not the absolute new direction that it’s heading in.

Blizzard could have also revealed the game through a surprise YouTube video or blog post. Some games are not going to generate the massive amount of hype that others will, and publishers are beginning to understand that. Last week, Sony launched the debut trailer for the MediEvil PS4 remake on the PlayStation Blog. When gamers can be reached at any time online, a game doesn’t always have to be announced at some glitzy event.

If Blizzard was adamant about revealing Immortal at BlizzCon, it should have been revealed earlier in the opening ceremony. Some gamers would have still been upset, but they would have understood that it was a smaller announcement in the studio’s arsenal. Many outlets are saying that Warcraft III: Reforged was the best announcement of the convention, and I agree with that. It should have been the final announcement of the morning, and Immortal should have come at the very beginning.

A Rare Miscalculation by Blizzard

Blizzard usually hits its game announcements out of the park, so it’s surprising to see what happened at BlizzCon with Diablo Immortal. The studio clearly misjudged how the BlizzCon audience would react to a mobile game, and while it reiterated that it still has multiple unannounced Diablo projects, fans have no idea of when to expect the game that they really want. It will be interesting to see if Blizzard tries to clarify the situation in the immediate future, or if we’ll have to wait until next year’s BlizzCon and hope we hear something then.