I’m excited for Diablo Immortal and I don’t care what you have to say

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Friday afternoon as I was winding down from a long week of work, I tuned in to Blizzcon on Twitch to see what exciting announcements and updates were coming to its stable of games. I happened to turn in right before the Diablo Immortal segment.

I knew it wasn’t a true Diablo sequel because we were told that it wasn’t, so when the speaker started hinting at mobile I was excited. I would love to have Diablo on my phone. But, at that moment, it seemed like I was alone. The crowd literally booed this man on stage with the announcement.

Obviously shooketh, he continued through with the announcement to a quiet audience, broken occasionally by boos and light cheers. It was honestly a bit rough to watch.

Honestly, just pathetic

Booing a man that’s just trying to do his job? Just sad, to be honest. I get it, you were expecting a Diablo 4 announcement or some other PC/console release, that’s fine. I understand the disappointment, but just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean you get to be a dick to this dude on stage.

Just because it isn’t for you, doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t excited. (It’s me, I’m excited.) People are acting like the team making Diablo 4 stopped what they were doing to create this game, I promise you that’s not the case.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, gamers received too much power. Too much influence over games. Look at what “fans” have made out of the Destiny franchise. Every week a new complaint, every other week a new patch to fix something that was “broken.” Rinse, repeat. Some complaints in Destiny have literally come full circle, now back to the original pain point because gamers are trash.

Gamers, like many people in general, have learned that if you yell louder people will listen. What has happened is that games and developers tiptoe this line between telling the story it wants to tell and appeasing fans that like to whine on social media. Fans, that have never made a game or been a part of the developer meetings or financial calls, yelling about things they don’t understand.

Now, that being said, there are some things we as gamers should never allow – sexism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, stuff like that. We should yell loud and not accept it, but a game that you don’t like? Nah, you need to chill out.

Things Blizzard could have done differently

I was a bit surprised by the announcement, like many others, but because I’m an actual adult that understands crying doesn’t mean shit, I sat and watched the event unfold and found by the end I was excited to play.

That’s not to say Blizzard played this in an optimal way. Maybe they had faith that their adult Diablo fanbase wouldn’t stoop to literally booing a man on stage, I don’t know, but it is possible Blizzard could have approached this better.

Maybe not lead off with statements about everyone loving Diablo then following it up with statements about people loving their phones. Flip that around, start with a statement about mobile phones, prep your audience for a mobile announcement. If they don’t play mobile games they are out of the convo, if they do, they’re listening. Best of both worlds.

Also, Blizzard could have paired the announcement with some other Diablo news, like Bethesda did with Fallout 4 and Fallout Shelter, or released the game the same day as the announcement. There were options here, but Mark Kern, a producer on Diablo II, said it best when on Twitter he stated that Blizzard doesn’t understand its fans anymore.

While I agree somewhat, I think it was more that Blizzard has faith in its fans, but that doesn’t mean that the company couldn’t have worked out a better solution for the announcement. But again, the crying and whining are unwarranted, and that’s the main takeaway here.

What do you think? Are you excited for Diablo Immortal? Let us know in the comments.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• A new search suggestion on Nintendo’s website points to a YouTube app on Nintendo Switch
• There’s a patch of road in Red Dead Redemption 2 that kills anything that passes through it with fire
• Here are your free Twitch Prime games in November

Josiah Motley

Former KnowTechie editor.