Blizzard Entertainment president J. Allen Brack recently said that the studio has learned “a huge number of lessons” from the poor reception of Diablo Immortal.
In case you don’t know already, Diablo Immortal developed by NetEase was announced at BlizzCon 2018 by Blizzard. The surprise announcement was met with a negative response because everyone was expecting a Diablo 4 announcement for a long time.
IGN recently sat down with Allen Brack to discuss the future of the company.
In the interview, Brack explained that the company failed to articulate that PC games will always be a core part of Blizzard Entertainment. Furthermore, Brack confirmed that the company will continue to be a gaming company.
A huge number of lessons. I think that one of the things that we failed to do was to really help articulate that we are a PC gaming company and that we’re going to continue to be a PC gaming company.
Brack then continued to address the fan concerns about Diablo Immortal being a mobile game and how the company has now shifted away from PC gaming by explaining their journey.
We started our journey in ye-olden times as a console company, and then we migrated to PC. And in the last few years, we’ve moved Diablo 3 to console, we’ve moved Overwatch to console, we’ve moved Diablo 3 to Switch. And those have been good things, that I think a lot of people have resonated with. But fundamentally our roots are PC, a strong PC game company, and that’s not going to change.
In short, Brack is trying to make PC gamers understand that the company will continue to make PC games in the future despite the announcement of Diablo Immortal mobile. Blizzard will never stop working on PC games, which is good news for all the fans. Aside from Diablo mobile, Blizzard is working on new mobile titles across all of their IPs.
Good news is that there are many video games in development by Blizzard for consoles and PC, as confirmed by Brack during Activision’s recent earnings call. It’s expected that Diablo 4 will be finally discussed at BlizzCon 2019 with a release date announcement.
On the other hand, Diablo Immortal release date is still unknown. Diablo mobile is planned for release on iOS and Android devices.
