Diablo's Immortal fiasco

In case you were wondering why I haven't posted here about Activision Blizzard's Diablo Immortal woes, it's because I've been posting about them on my blog all about Diablo III, and why it was such a disappointment to me.

You can find those posts here:

• Diablo Immortal... Kripparrian called it perfectly
• Diablo Immortal fallout keeps on falling...
• Diablo II's producer piles on
• Finally getting it
• Not so Immortal, after all?
• Diablo Immortal just became a lot less interesting
• Not good enough

As far as this blog is concerned, I believe that Blizzard's Diablo Immortal mis-steps are more a matter of incompetence than malice.

It doesn't particularly bother me that Activision Blizzard have rethought their original stance on mobile gaming, and decided to bring some of all of their IPs to mobile, as reported by multiple outlets, including Mashable:

Diablo Immortal is just the tip of the iceberg for Blizzard Entertainment's new ventures in mobile.

After the reveal of Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon Friday, I had a chance to talk to Blizzard founder Allen Adham, who is currently the executive producer of incubation, about its newly announced mobile game and the possibility of other Blizzard franchises getting the mobile treatment.

No other new mobile games were confirmed by Adham, but he did nod at the fact that the company is interested in creating more mobile games, even hinting at the fact that more unannounced projects are currently in production.

"We're excited to imagine taking all of our IPs [intellectual properties] into this venue and bringing them to a full-on global audience," Adham said. "I think in some cases they'll be completely new games. You see this with Hearthstone — a total reimagining of an all-new game type using the Warcraft IP. In some cases it might be — like we've shown with Diablo Immortal — a similar game type but different and unlinked from the core game franchise."

This does not bother me. Yes, I am a PC gamer; I don't do a lot of mobile gaming (or console gaming for that matter). Even so, the idea that a publisher would like to reach out to a bigger audience in this way just seems to me like good business sense. In fact, given the AAA videogame industry's lately-found love of free2play monetization strategies, the fact that they're embracing mobile platforms that are largely built on them just seems like an obvious move. As long as the games are good, and their monetization models are not exploitative, the decision to make mobile games is not necessarily a bad thing.

I also don't care that Diablo III, in particular, is getting a mobile version. I've long since moved on from Diablo fandom; I'm not waiting for Blizzard to announce a Diablo II remaster, and might not buy Diablo IV, even if Blizzard do make one. The Diablo III dev and leadership teams made it painfully clear that they didn't care about my ongoing business at all, back when it mattered; they kept telling me to move along, so I moved along, and have very little desire to go backwards.

That said, I'm curious enough to see what this ends up looking like to have pre-registered for the beta, and as long as it doesn't fail any more of my pre-established criteria for doing so, I'll give it a try. Why not? One of my criteria is that it can't cost anything up front, or be laden with intrusive or exploitative monetization (i.e. it must be genuinely free to play, with only ethical, purely cosmetic microtransactions, much like another game that I play a lot), in which case trying it costs nothing but a little time.

In short, while the Diablo Immortal fiasco is hilarious, it doesn't quite rise to the level of corporate bullshit which would justify any significant coverage here, so this will likely be the only time that I post about it on this blog. In case you were wondering.

Red Shirt Guy is still a hero, though.

If you were one of the people unhappy with last week’s announcement of the Diablo Immortal mobile game, you probably won’t like what else Blizzard Entertainment has in the works. In a recent Q&A panel, Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham confirmed that the company is working on mobile games based on all of its franchises, not just Diablo. “In terms of Blizzard’s approach to mobile gaming, many of us over the last few years have shifted from playing primarily desktop to playing many hours on mobile, and we have many of our best developers now working on new mobile titles across all of our IPs,” Adham said. “Some of them are with external partners, like Diablo Immortal; many of them are being developed internally only, and we’ll have information to share on those in the future. I will say also that we have more new products in development today at Blizzard than we’ve ever had in our history and our future is very bright.” Adham didn’t elaborate, but given that he said these titles will cover “all” of Blizzard’s IPs, we can expect to see mobile iterations of Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Starcraft and the like. In a separate interview with Digital Trends, Adham stressed that these mobile games won’t replace the PC titles Blizzard is most famous for. Instead, he said expanding to mobile development is part of the company’s long history of developing games across for a variety of devices.

Read more at MobileSyrup.com: Blizzard is developing mobile games across all of its franchises