Blizzard repeat they're working on 'multiple unannounced Diablo projects'

Blizzard have repeated that they have multiple teams work on multiple Diablo things, keeping hope alive for Diablo 4, following Friday's announcement of unexciting mobile game Diablo Immortal. Blizzard had warned beforehand that they weren't ready to talk about all their Diablo projects and that BlizzCon's Diablo news would not be "what many of you are hoping for", and indeed it was not. I don't want to play a Diablo mobile game so I simply shan't play Diablo Immortal, though going by some people's reactions I might have missed Blizzard vowing to kick my dad's teeth out and force-feed me them if I don't play it for five hours every day. I hope they won't do that.

Blizzard repeated the point on stage during an Immortal session at BlizzCon, and co-founder Allen Adham got into it more in an interview with Kotaku. He explained that one team is working with Chinese developers NetEase on Diablo Immortal while other folks pursue other projects, so the mobile game is not the sum of Blizzard's current Diablo efforts.

"There are actually two distinct teams," Adham told Kotaku. "That's something we tried to communicate. I know our community here, there's a concern that we are focused on this instead of that. The truth is that we have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple unannounced Diablo projects even after announcing [Immortal]."

Diablo Immortal clearly isn't the game many Diablans would like to see, but I can't get onboard with those outraged by its existence. A publicly-traded megacorp are turning a multisquillion-dollar series into a mobile game I won't play, and so what? I don't care. With more amazing games in the world than I will ever have time to play, the existence of a game I simply don't want to play means little to me. I can wait for Diablo IV or Diablo II HD or whatever it is Blizzard are up to, and Blizzard say their teams are separate anyway. Plus, a number of people in the BlizzCon audience clearly were into Immortal.

I didn't mention the backlash (the jibes, the YouTube dislikes, the out-of-context quotes, the tweets, the Reddit posts, and so on) in our first Immortal post and several readers called me out for that. I rarely mention that sort of backlash in RPS posts because I think it's mostly newsworthy not as a rallying cry of sticking it to The Man but rather as a demonstration of petty and terrible aspects of our games culture. You don't need me to tell you people on the Internet are disproportionately upset about giant video game franchises; that's every day. And you don't need me to tell you to be angry; you can react to the game yourself. My reaction is: I don't care.

Diablo Immortal is coming to pocket telephones "when it's done." As for Diablo IV or Diablo II HD or whatever... well, we'll see.