Diablo Immortal, the first-ever mobile entry of the Blizzard franchise announced with quite the uproar back at BlizzCon 2018, just passed a new development milestone as it is now being tested internally across the entire company. That means the public release isn’t due soon as the developers will first have to go through the feedback of their own colleagues and make appropriate changes, but it is getting there, according to Lead Designer Wyatt Cheng.
The Diablo Immortal team is eager to see how our Blizzard colleagues around the world experience our game. From the very first login to choosing a Legendary item to perfectly complement your build, we’ll be soliciting feedback to guide our decisions as we iterate on the game before it goes beyond Blizzard’s walls. In our quest to reimagine what is possible on mobile, we want to make sure the game delivers authentic Diablo combat with traditional Blizzard polish in a way that is natively intuitive on the platform.
Once our playtest concludes, the team will focus on working through the feedback. This milestone is crucial to our team because we want to ensure that Diablo Immortal is the best experience for our players when we’re ready to share it with the world. Getting the game into the hands of more of us at Blizzard is a major step toward getting it into yours.
Diablo Immortal is coming together, and we can’t wait to share more details about our ongoing testing and release plans as development progresses.
Diablo Immortal was also tangentially referenced in the latest Activision Blizzard Q2 2020 earnings call, as the global success of Call of Duty Mobile was cited by President and COO Daniel Alegre as a ‘proof point’ for how the company’s other franchises can spread onto mobile.
CoD Mobile is off to a really great start, but we’re just scratching the surface of what that franchise can be on mobile, and then integrating the experiences across multiple platforms as we know is just an incredible opportunity for the franchise. But, to the early successes, they do represent incredible proof points as to your question of how the franchise strategy is really working, and it certainly applies to a lot of other franchises that we have.
We see that our current players really want more ways to engage with their favorite IP via through mobile or other platforms. And that offering authentic and really deep experiences on new platforms can drive much, much higher engagement, and this quarter’s results really show that.
And we also see that the free-to-play on mobile and other platforms can bring in multiples of new players into our franchises. Importantly, with strong execution, this is not cannibalistic. Actually on the contrary, free-to-play coexists with other business models and can be meaningfully additive to a franchise, bringing new players into the ecosystem. So, these proof points are relevant across our portfolio. And to your question, it’s not just Diablo but it’s also across all our franchises, and our teams see an opportunity to drive a greater reach, engagement and player investment greater than ever before across the franchises.
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