All of its showings and impressions from those who went hands-on with its suggested that this was no typical free-to-play mobile cashgrab. Credit where credit is due, they were actually doing quite a good job. Those years were eventful ones for the company, which is putting it mildly, and not in a good way, but specifically where Diablo Immortal was concerned, slowly but surely, things were beginning to look up.įor about a year or two in the lead-up to Diablo Immortal’s eventual launch, Blizzard actually worked quite hard to turn people around on the game. Diablo Immortal receded into the background and Blizzard, along with co-developer NetEase, continued working on the game for the next several years. That initial backlash gave way to indifference and apathy over the next couple of years. “Do you guys not have phones?” the developer infamously said, which, of course, was just perfectly emblematic of how out of touch Blizzard was (and continues to be) with its fanbase. Infamously, the company completely misread the context leading up to the game’s announcement, decided to hype people up for a new Diablo reveal, followed up on that hype with the reveal of a free-to-play mobile game, and then had the audacity to act surprised when people were disappointed. Announced first back in 2018, the free-to-play action RPG was the instant recipient of some of the worst and most vicious backlash in Blizzard history. Delays, poor decisions, disappointing releases, and yes, once again, a healthy amount of backlash- all of that is still found in abundance when you look at Blizzard’s recent history.ĭiablo Immortal is a huge part of that recent history. But even if we’re looking purely at Blizzard Entertainment’s operations as a developer and publisher of video games just for the purposes of this feature, the picture that gets painted is still an ugly one. Things have happened outside the realms of their games – major, massive things – that have been nothing short of an indictment of the culture of Activision Blizzard as a whole, and the company and the people in charge there have been on the receiving end of some extremely justified criticism as a result, to say the very least. It’s been a tough few years for Blizzard, for so many reasons.

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