Diablo: Immortal YouTube Reactions

These are as of 5:45PM Pacific.  Again, I felt that the cinematic itself was well done but I realize people are expressing their dissatisfaction with this mobile title.

I made a short posting on the official forums in a thread where someone mentioned that this is exactly what "all" Activision Blizzard investors care about.  And I had to set the record straight that even though I am an investor in ATVI myself, I'm also not one who believes that a company should only care about revenue growth/profits at the expense of everything else.  The day that executives only care about those numbers is the day they mortgage the future longterm viability of their own company (it just takes time for things to manifest itself).

Seeing the reaction of dislikes on these two videos is something that Blizzard executives shouldn't take lightly because as I noted, this will have a detrimental domino effect on goodwill.  As I have mentioned many times in the past on this blog, I went from someone who was a "guaranteed sale of Blizzard's franchises that I was interested in" to non-customer/non-player that no longer has much feeling left for this company or its iconic franchises.  Blizzard will have their work cut out to even half-convince me that I should spend money on this drek, a Diablo II re-master, or "Diablo 4" (where this one attempts to at least be more ARPG like even if the direction does shift to something similar to what Torchlight Frontiers has aimed for).

UPDATE: I spent some time looking at Reddit as well as other gaming sites and the overall reaction is just not very positive at all.  The general gist echoes my own past thoughts about how Blizzard's designers/dev teams have had this arrogant tendency to "believe they know what is right or what it is that the players want" (and being too out of touch) which is not the design objective with ARPG's (which is what this entire blog ended up devolving into when it came to D3) where the game designers are determining the best builds or game play styles.

I'm afraid that if they follow the same patronizing tactics which they used with Diablo III (not really listening to the feedback), they will end up alienating a lot more of even their most dedicated Diablo fans (which are those folks who have stuck with the game over the past few years).  That is not the sort of loyal customers you want to give up even though there may be other untapped ones (those folks aren't as "sticky" due to that exact lack of history with Blizzard or the franchise).

With that said, given there are still a few senior/leads on Team 3 (the exact ones which I had mentioned in the past who I don't even want to see near "Diablo 4") that have been around since Jay Wilson was the game director, my feeling is that they will remain tone deaf and proceed with this project (especially if once again, there is a higher level executive directive to make it happen just like the Real Money Auction House experiment).  I guess the ball is in Blizzard's court on this one.