Shout out to the guy at blizzcon who asked if this was an out of season April fools joke.

https://clips.twitch.tv/PunchyImpossibleCoyoteYouWHY

So they announced a mobile game to a crowd of fans dedicated enough to attend their event when that crowd has been waiting like 6 years for a proper sequel. Smart move.

They probably should have done what bethesda did with TES and announced their mobile spinoff while teasing the true direct sequel. That way people get a sense of security that their long awaited sequel is in the works and the mobile game is a side to accompany their announcement main course.

I can't say that I'm personally excited that it was a mobile game reveal but I'm still way more embarrassed for fans doing shit like this.

I get the disappointment at it not being what everyone wanted but come on Diablo 4 will obviously still be coming and this scenario where nobody plays mobile games is not real.

Don't really understand why they couldn't have led with this and then moved on to the much more exciting WC3 stuff though..

I scoffed at this more than anything else. Apparently my life has just become a series of moments in which I feel old. It really feels like not that long ago that people were chomping at the bit for this game, or that the servers were jacked up. Can't believe it's been 6 years.

@sethmode: Want another? It's been 7 (read S E V E N) years since skyrim was originally released. Gamebryo originated in 1997. That's 21 years for anyone counting. Isn't that impressive? Don't forget to buy your 7th copy of Skyrim today!

Holy shit, Blizzard actually announced a phone game at Blizzcon? Wow, just wow. Whoever's bright idea that was needs to really question their position at the company. At most a Diablo phone game announcement should be some random news drop in the middle of the week.

If they had announced this along side a Diablo 2 remaster or another character expansion for Diablo 3 no one would care. But they literally built all this up as "a good year to be a Diablo fan" to then announce the Switch port and this mobile game. The worst part is it is outsourced to a developer who has already made a game that looks almost identical to this "new" Diablo game. Blizzard always does high quality work so for them to put this out and have it be their "big" final Blizzcon announcement is insane. I can't imagine what they were thinking.

The worst part is the game straight up looks like a re-skin of a game the developer already made. It seems like the worst cash grab, something Blizzard usually doesn't do, say what you will about their business models.

@oljunebug: oh it's absolutely reading the room about as wrong as you ever could lol. like, it's fucking BlizzCon; the people there are probably as deeply invested in your stuff as it gets, and this is the thing you cart out to them? it's a pretty absurdly stupid thing to do when folks are obviously hankering for either Diablo 4, or Diablo 2 Remastered. just a gigantic sad trombone of an announcement.

but then as a burned fan, why not just not show up to the Q&A at all, instead of being an asshole to the people who are just there to show off their game, you know? this guy's question, and i saw another person ask if it was gonna be playable on PC (which is a fair question, to be clear), to which the devs said no and the crowd began to boo, it's just another level of shitty.

1. there shouldnt have been a blizzcon this year 2. that guy is a huge dick.

The internet is leaking.

Guy came across like a real asshole.

I literally predicted they'd show a mobile Diablo at this show after they announced they wouldn't be showing Diablo 4.

It makes a lot of sense--the mobile market dominates in Asia and makes huge sums of money. Partnering with Netease gets them on Chinese phones easily.

This douchebag was too dumb to realize that making a mobile Diablo isn't for him--it's for the Asian market and frankly it's for the aging population of formerly hardcore Diablo players (myself included) who have far more time for mobile games than we do for console or PC ones.

That said, it's understandable that PC diehards would be annoyed that they were focusing on the mobile title but what did they expect? Blizzard tempered expectations when they said clearly Diablo 4 wasn't going to be at Blizzcon. At the keynote, they clearly said that Diablo Immortal was their big Diablo news and that entire panel was focused on it.

If this edgy mofo was so annoyed about Diablo Immortal, why'd he even attend an hour long presentation all about it?

@drm2thej: Dunno man, I'm going to say that if this game was made for the Asian markets maybe they should just start holding their conferences in Beijing and cut out the middle man. Blizzard has been successfully courting the Chinese market since World of Warcraft. Maybe they should do what Activision does and market their mobile/free-to-play version of their popular game to China and never mention that it exist to western audiences.

Dude, what is everyone's problem? A "real" Diablo game (so they claim) that I can easily play on a device I already have on me all the time? What's not to like? We'll see if it lives up to the franchine name once it's out, but jesus christ, do we need to always be so immediately negative about everything? It's exhausting.

I'm on the side of duders and dudettes that said this was a huge misfire. In a void, this product isn't too controversial. But the pre-show hype and subsequent arena for this announcement was a massive miscalculation, and the PR blowback serves as proof. Who in their right mind would announce a game to a demographic of the audience with bigger interest in a different platform?

This isn't E3. The attendees and viewers are definitely a known quantity at this point. Blizzard should be able to gauge their fans well enough to prevent unfortunate outcomes such as this.

Diablo fans are starved for some news, any news, about D4, or a possible D2 remaster, and Blizzard knows this. This is on them. They hyped "new projects in the Diablo universe", then dispelled any hype of a possible D4 announcement. How did they expect their loyal following to react to an outsourced Diablo phone game as their big 'Diablo' reveal? Blizz looked like tone deaf idiots and deserved the sarcasm they got. Over 140K dislikes on the new Immortal trailers and they are on like their third or fourth re-uploaded trailer. Epic PR fail.

Imagine Rockstar, knowing fans had been longing for another Red Dead game, had hyped up a pending announcement only to reveal it was a phone game that appeared to use a lot of recycled assets. And not just that, but that it was going to be made by an outside team. Any developer that did this with a beloved franchise that had not received a new iteration in awhile would receive the same backlash.

Were the dickish questions by some in the audience helpful? Not at all, but you can understand the frustration.

Because he was so annoyed about Diablo Immortal that he attended an hour long presentation so he could ask that question.

@merxworx01 - Blizzard have done that before. Not full Blizzard events, but they've announced things in Asia before. It's so obvious this is for that market that they should've announced it there, instead of the very last thing of their presser.

@jjweatherman - It's not a real Diablo game. All the press who have played it have pretty much said it's a whole lot of nothing.

Completely justified. Saying "We love Diablo" infront of hundreds of hardcore Diablo fans, and then announcing this garbage mobile shovelware, outsourced by some Chinese developer who puts out knock-off class shit, is such an unbelievably disappointing move. Might as well own up to what they are actually doing, go down into the crowd and spit in every persons face. Would be more honest. They are also combing through their site and their Youtube channel deleting negative comments and re-uploading videos because the Like/Dislike ratio was so skewed.

It is a glorious trash fire, and they deserve every bit of it. I just feel bad for the poor sap they pushed out onto the stage who had to try to present this nonsense. He started out okay, but after seeing the crowd's reaction to the game, he noticeably got very nervous and started tripping over his words.

Here's an even better one, Blizzard getting boo'd at their own convention for the first time. In an attempt to diffuse the situation with a joke, Wyatt chimes in with a "Do you guys not have phones!?". What an absolute mess, I can't believe they couldn't predict this happening. Why host a Q&A directly after an announcement you know won't go over well with the fans? Just goes to show how incredibly tone-deaf they are.

The interesting question to me is how did the marketing department manage to misread their audience this badly, to present it after all wind up, in that venue, to that audience and demographic of people going to Blizzcon to look at a Diablo game in 2018 (ie: the diehardest of die hard fans), with no positive cushion (like say a D2 remaster).

Especially after seeing what happened to EA's C&C mobile announcement earlier this year.

On one hand, Blizzard probably should have said something to the effect of "This isn't Diablo 4" sooner rather than later because of the video game hype machine being an unrelenting beast. Should have taken some notes from SquareEnix on what not to do in that situation.

But on the other hand and to continue my streak of being a devil's advocate, I can't help but look at the most hyperbolic Diablo fans and ask "You mad, bro?"

@facelessvixen: Well it was said weeks ago that Diablo 4 would not be at this show, so it was never going to be that announcement

It was still a misplay to drop this without something like the Diablo 2 remaster everybody thought was happening instead but its still not as though this thing was in place of or interfering at all with the actual new game everyone's waiting for.

That guy's a legend, i assume Blizzard are making the next actual Diablo game too, be that a sequel or remaster, but something exciting was teased leading up to the event and it turned out to be... a mobile game... Bad plan.

Diablo mobile sounds dope, I dunno why the hell “enthusiasts” need to dismiss every game that’s not exactly what they want for.

It was certainly a misfire out of Blizzard to announce it this way I guess, seeing the reaction, but I’m way more embarrassed at the Diablo “fans” than Blizzard here. I played so much Diablo 3 and if the mobile game is good I can see myself playing tons of it.

If 95% of mobile games weren't absolute trash designed to milk currency from whales, people might be more interested in what the game has to offer.

I would also feel better about the reaction if I was not reasonably sure that an announcement for Diablo 4 would have had the same outcry only because somebody saw more than two colors somewhere in it.

Not for nothing, this thread will at least be super interesting when Diablo Immortal becomes a disgustingly huge success.

Not that the two games at this time seem particularly comparable, since one is Blizzard polish and one seems like a farmed out contract but.. I could not help being reminded of similar people yelling about Who Wants a fuckin' Warcraft card game?!

@efesell: That was immediately where my mind went, and then I glanced over at my wife's tablet and saw her playing a card game of a franchise she hadn't heard of before it. As you said, one feels farmed out and the other has polish for days but still, I bet Diablo Immortal will ne successful with the type and amount of people it needs to be successful with.

@phraxic: This kind of shit is so fucking gross. The dude is just doing his job. Making a dumb bad game doesn't give you carte blanche to harass the guy.

The twitch clip made me laugh, good on that guy, I agree with him. I like Blizzard but come on, what did they actually expect??

I'm sure the game will be wildly successful. I'm sure I'll try it out but it won't be for me.

I'm sure that the guy that asked that question is an entitled jerk. Not everything is for you.

You know the fans I feel bad for? The ones at the Hearthstone stage who didn't get to see the Hearthstone announcement in person.

It's a reskinned mobile game from a chinese developer, who is disliked even by the chinese for being more pay2win and more expensive than other developers. So the odds of it being a huge success are at least questionable. The whole thing is indeed disgusting though, lol.

@efesell: I'm not usually a fan of gamers acting entitled and combative like this, but the guy paid 200 dollars to go to that event and the big reveal was a phone game. A phone game that could generously be described as not being made with the fans in mind.

Personally, I have no issue with people in his position throwing salty jokes at blizzard. Frankly, I think the classy move here would be to refund all of those people.

That's ridiculous. It's not a $200 show just for one Diablo announcement and you don't get money back because what you wanted didn't show up. Especially when it was announced beforehand that the thing most people wanted was never going to be there at all.

Like I'm not saying that dude, and others, can't be disappointed but there's no reason to get out there and show your whole ass in the process.

IMHO and in actual indisputable fact, Blizzard hasn't produced anything worthwhile since the turn of the century, starting with LoD the diablo 2 expansion. It boggles my mind that in the recent Quicklook Jeff and Brad are such hardcore apologists for D3 (by proxy and memory) even though they don't ever actually play it, even though they joke about the mindlessness of it, the crappy story, the visual mess and even though they never have seen the end-game. This mindset that blizzard games are continuosly patched and therefore high quality is a trap and a fallacy. All talent and vision appears to have left blizzard long ago and has been replaced with corporate sycophants, what Blizzard produces is the game equivalent of Transformers/Star Wars movies. And they naturally target very young audiences.

Their games are some of the ugliest, most derivative, lowest common denominator turds imaginable, polished to a sheen . And I'm sure this new Diablo on phone will crush all previous revenue records, and kill at least a dozen people in traffic with their phones on release week. Even though people scoff at mobile, it's the obvious corporate move, the biggest bonanza and opportunity. And Blizzard doesn't even pretend to do anything other than that, the equivalent of painting colorful comic characters on bottles of vodka and vape fluid.

The success of Blizzard (same as with the popularity Giant Bombcast) is not a coincidence but another proof that it's more important to always show up rather than to do well. They early appropriated the "Games as a service/Games as a religious cult" model, stumbling by accident into the infinite replayability of both competitive Starcraft and loot boxes, then further degrading into MMOs, CCGs and free-to-play.

@efesell: I'm not saying there should be a refund because a specific thing didn't show up. I'm saying they should get a refund because the big event of the evening (a specific evening that has always been directly targeted at blizzards most hardcore fans) was a freemium gacha game.

And it's not like the fans started rioting or personally attacked the people on stage. They just made it clear that this is not what they wanted. Something blizzard should have known in advance but was somehow out of touch enough not to.

Keep in mind, people have not behaved like this in the prior years of blizzcon. No, not even for hearthstone. Maybe the people didn't get exponentially more shitty this year. Maybe Blizzard is the problem here.

@darkmoney52: I have literally never known a moment where Blizzard fans were not shitty, to be honest. It's an intensely miserable community.

@efesell: Unfortunately, I spend a fair bit of time on the overwatch forums so I know what you mean.

That said, I've never seen them bo at blizzcon or try to provoke blizzard staff at blizzcon. The behavior we're all discussing in this thread- I actually haven't seen before. And I don't think its unjustified. The bare minimum I would expect at an event like blizzcon is a good faith attempt at showing products for their fans. In that basic goal, I think blizzard really failed this year.

@darkmoney52: I think they failed with this Diablo announcement but also preceding was WC3 remaster so I'm still not all the way down on the shows events.

Like an entire E3 presser is not a disaster because they fuck up and show Days Gone or whatever.

@efesell: Okay, now THIS is a savage burn.

@cmblasko: Making a funny edit isn't harassment dude. Calm down and enjoy the fun of watching Blizzard burn for their miscalculated announcement.

This video of Steve Jobs is perfect for modern game developers

So I totally understand the desire for D4 news, I'm in the same boat, but the way a large portion of the diablo community is acting like spoiled brats throwing a tantrum is totally inexcusable. Throwing out "burns" to a guy who is just doing his job is pretty shitty, and the online community in general is just extremely unbearable to read posts from right now.

Despite that, Blizzard really should have pulled an elder scrolls and showed a title at least to avoid this though. The higher ups in charge of planning this seem really out of touch with the audience that attends these conventions.

Fun fact. There are a lot of Diablo clones on mobile, and some of them are really popular. I've seen a lot of the fans of those games say that they were looking for a Daiblo-like game on to play on the go. This is just Blizzard trying to collect that money for themselves. And I think there's a good chance for them to be successful with this.

And also, I've seen a lot of "we have been waiting 6 six years already for a proper sequel". Keep in mind that it was 12 years between Diablo 2 and 3, and both of them had expansions after their initial releases. Blizzard rarely make numbered sequels within a decade of the previous one.

@pweidman: I mean, don't get me wrong, I kind of hope that it fails. But I will super not be surprised when it doesn't!

But they've already said Diablo 4 is coming out, just not in the near future...

Honestly though, there shouldn't have been a Blizzcon this year. Every announcement was a lackluster stopgap. I love Overwatch, and the new character looks fine, but they put out 3 characters a year. I was hyped for the rumored single player campaign, but nope... Hearthstone and HotS just chug on regardless and I don't think any WOW news will make people happy.

I think a lot of people are missing the context here, as to why the reaction seem overly harsh. This all goes back several years. Remember, it took Blizzard 20 years to revisit the Diablo franchise, and when they did they released a game that wasn't received too well by the community. People like to talk about the early days connection issues, but even before the game was out people discussed the RMAH to bits and with the later revealed weighted loot system it was pretty unanimously agreed upon that the whole thing was extremely detrimental to the game. Now, they turned the ship around and managed to get things on track, but as the years has gone by the franchise has again been sidelined more and more and more (to the point of barely having a presence at Blizzcon).

The Diablo community has been marginalized and ignored time and time again and with the announcement earlier this year that "it would be a good year for Diablo fans" it seemed like it was finally their time to get some good news. Did they maybe get their hopes up a bit too much ? Probably, but you can't really blame them with an announcement like that after years and years of small pickings. Neither the D3 expansion or the Necro class got pre-hype of the same degree. This isn't just a small/medium PR blunder, but years and years of mismanagement of the community and their communication with their audience.