“We don’t have any plans at the moment to do PC.”

*Crowd starts booing*

“Do you guys not have phones?!”

The above isn’t some minor segment from a comedy sketch. It’s exactly the exchange we all saw at BlizzCon 2018 when the Diablo team came on stage for the Diablo: Immortal Q&A session. To put it in simple terms, Diablo fans were pissed off.

We’re now less than a month away from BlizzCon 2019 and Blizzard president J. Allen Brack is trying to patch things up. In an interview with Gamespot, Brack explains how the Diablo: Immortal announcement was a PR disaster that failed to send the right message to fans of the series.

“I think the thing that we did a poor job of when we announced Diablo: Immortal was contextualizing what we think the future can be and what we think of mobile in particular.”

– J. Allen Brack, Blizzard president.

Diablo: Immortal screenshot. Image courtesy of Blizzard.

Brack said that they did a “poor job double emphasising” the fact that Blizzard is still a PC developer first and that they’re always on the look out for other platforms that can also give “awesome” gameplay experiences. Looking back at the exchange I put up in the beginning of this article, it sounds more like damage control rather than sincere reassurance.

The biggest problem with mobile games is how they sacrifice quality for the sake of facilitating predatory monetisation schemes. Brack knows this and says that “we can have Blizzard values around monetisation”. You can literally swap ‘Blizzard’ in that sentence with the name of any other game company and it would still sound like the bland corporate speak that it is.

“If you’re a core PC gamer, then there are not an insignificant number of mobile games that don’t have a great reputation. We’ve seen these games, and we’ve played these games. We’ve played games that we feel like are predatory when it comes to monetization, that are not the most fun experience that we could imagine, and not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s hard [for people] to see how Blizzard is still Blizzard on that platform.”

– J. Allen Brack, Blizzard president.

Back during BlizzCon 2018, the team did mention that they were working on multiple Diablo projects. Honestly, you can’t blame the fans for ignoring this after you announced Diablo: Immortal. It only leads to people believing that these other Diablo projects are probably as undesirable. Like a Diablo card game or something.

No matter what Brack says, the damage has been done and fans will not be convinced of Blizzard’s honesty until they actually come out with another full-fledged Diablo title. Hopefully, that’s what’s going to be announced at BlizzCon 2019, happening on 1 & 2 November 2019.