Here’s something I’ve noticed over and over again as the years shuffle on: When there’s a controversy in the gaming industry, the impulse seems to be to point fingers at gamers and how wicked and entitled they are rather than think of them as consumers. Stop it with the 'entitled gamer' routine. With a bungled announcement, one might expect that fingers would be pointed at Blizzard and its surprising incompetence on this front, but sadly that was largely brushed under the table as everyone began focusing their ire on the usual suspects: Gamers. So we’re left clueless as ever, still wondering when and what the next real Diablo game will be. We know for a fact that Immortal won’t be as good as a PC Diablo title.

It doesn’t help that we PC and console players are not only aware of the mobile game industry’s bad monetization practices, but also of the limits of mobile gaming’s inputs and controls. It doesn’t help that early reports from players of the Diablo Immortal demo are largely tepid at best. Of course gamers are eager to find out more-to find out anything, really. If we knew even the tiniest details, had even a sliver of a glimpse at the game or a cinematic from it, this firestorm would have been almost entirely avoided.ĭiablo 3 was mired in a great deal of controversy at launch but went on not only to great success, but to become a truly great game in its own right. When everything else is said and done, if gamers were simply given a taste of Diablo 4 to tide them over, this whole fiasco would have been a much smaller controversy.

Everyone would be excited for the new PC title and rightly view the mobile title as a placeholder akin to Fallout Shelter or Fallout 76. Simply tossing in a brief teaser with the words ‘Diablo 4’ at the end would have changed the story from negative to positive at the outset. Instead, fans at BlizzCon were introduced to a mobile game.

Blizzard diablo immortal announcement