Blizzard executive producer Allen Adham has just teased that more of the company’s IPs will likely get the mobile treatment, following the recent announcement of Diablo Immortal.
You might recall that the fan reaction to a mobile focused Diablo was… less than stellar, but that hasn’t stopped Adham from speaking out about doing the same with other Blizzard properties.
According to a Reddit user, Adham said during a BlizzCon 2018 press conference:
In terms of Blizzard’s approach to mobile gaming, many of us over the last few years have shifted from playing primarily desktop to playing many hours on mobile, and we have many of our best developers now working on new mobile titles across all of our IPs. Some of them are with external partners, like Diablo Immortal; many of them are being developed internally only, and we’ll have information to share on those in the future. I will say also that we have more new products in development today at Blizzard than we’ve ever had in our history and our future is very bright.
The big four franchises over at Blizzard of course, would be Diablo, Starcraft, Overwatch, and Warcraft. Given that Hearthstone is a hugely popular mobile spinoff of Warcraft, one might imagine Blizzard intends to do more in that vein, rather than port their IPs to mobile devices wholesale.
Acknowledging the announcement of Diablo 4 was very much on people’s minds, Adham also reiterated that Blizzard were still working on many, as yet unannounced Diablo projects, but stopped short of confirming anything else.
Adham said of the reaction to Diablo Immortal:
They [the community] love what they love and want what they want. That passion, it’s actually what drives us, and we feel it too. It’s why we make games and why we’ve made games for almost three decades now — and why our community is so passionate about our franchises. I understand their feeling and wish we could share more about all the amazing things we’re doing, not just with the Diablo franchise but across the company as a whole.
I’ve no doubt Blizzard will deliver plenty of genuinely exciting and unique mobile titles in the years to come. Let’s just hope the announcements are both timed and received a little better in future.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.