Diablo Ex-Producer Criticized Blizzard For Fans’ Negative Response At Diablo: Immortal

Blizzard’s new Diablo project received negative responses

In the opening ceremony of BlizzCon 2018 recently, Blizzard released the latest project for their legendary game Diablo – a mobile game, produced by a third-party, called Diablo: Immortal. However, Blizzard received unexpected, furious reactions from the Diablo community. Fans showed their strong hatred for the new game by making its trailer one of the most disliked Youtube videos, leaving thousands of comments about their disappointment on game forums, and even directly questioning developers at BlizzCon.

Following the Interner’s negative response against Diablo: Immortal, Mark Kern - an ex-employee of the company - made a long tweet about this issue.

What leads Blizzard to this situation?

As the producer of Diablo 2, Kern showed his disappointment at Blizzard unintelligent move when they decided to go against fans’ expectation. He wrote that “Blizzard not understanding gamers anymore”

However, Kern did not criticize his previous employer on making a mobile version of the game and even stated that he also “wanted one as an option”. Instead, he stressed that it was mainly because of the way Blizzard hinted, announced and presented Diablo: Immortal that made fans angry. From the announcement, Blizzard failed really hard on communicating with gamers, making them believe that the on-coming project would be Diablo 4 or at least a PC product, instead of a mobile version. This, other than the game’s platform, was the main factor that triggered the Diablo community.

What made Kern even more disappointed and surprised is how Blizzard did not foresee the consequence.

Kern remembers when he was still in charge of Diablo 2 production, "Blizzard never used to have to ask because it was made up of hardcore gamers from top to bottom…” and “Blizzard used to be really gamer-driven". In his opinion, the situation could have been handled much better in advance, especially with an experienced publisher like Blizzard. Kern believes that not only him, but many other developers could also easily tell that the release of a mobile version at this moment is really a bad move.

Despite receiving continuous complaints from players, Blizzard still believes that a mobile version will bring more benefits to Diablo series than downsides, and they are trying to calm people down by promising on new Diablo projects in the future.