To say that there was a lot of frustration surrounding the announcement of Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon 2018 would be putting things mildly. While Blizzard tried to temper expectations going into the event, few could have predicted that a mobile game announcement would be the centerpiece of BlizzCon’s keynote. Many fans were upset and they have been letting Blizzard know it in as many ways as possible.
Currently, the YouTube trailer for Diablo Immortal has a staggering 162,000 dislikes, with about 5,600 likes. Not to mention there are over 16,000 comments, most of them negative.
YouTube dislike floods are nothing new and they seem to be one of the preferred ways that fans let their frustrations be heard. Plenty of games have seen their ratio of likes to dislikes skew heavily towards the negative, to the point that sometimes publishers even delete the trailers.
In the case of this Diablo Immortal Cinematic Trailer, there are claims that Blizzard is deleting comments in order to mitigate the wave of negativity. At the time of writing, the top comment is only 1 hour old, has about 500 likes, and is about Blizzard deleting comments. It’s hard to imagine that a trailer released early this morning/afternoon would have such a recent comment as its top and with so few likes. But we have no way to verify these claims.
Other fans took to a Diablo Immortal panel at BlizzCon to voice their frustrations, as seen in the clip below.
Blizzard tried to get out ahead of the backlash by saying that a big Diablo announcement was unlikely at BlizzCon 2018 but many still held out hope for something exciting. After all, reports claim that there are several Diablo projects in the works, so at least one of them has to be a proper sequel. Apparently, Blizzard wasn’t ready to talk about sequels just yet and now the studio is facing an angry segment of its fan base.
It’s unclear what damage has been done (if any) but the conversation on forums and social media is not a good sign.
Diablo Immortal will release for mobile platforms.