Diablo Immortal... Kripparrian called it perfectly

It was back in January that Octavian Morosan, aka Kripparrian, talked about his prediction for what Blizzard would do next with its Diablo property. His prediction? Mobile. His reasoning was that Path of Exile has beaten Blizzard at the ARPG game so thoroughly that a new Diablo game wouldn't be able to compete on PC, but that mobile offerings in the ARPG genre were sparse enough that a Diablo mobile game could pretty much have the field to themselves.

You'll never guess what Blizzard just announced at Blizzcon. As reported by KotakuAU:

Six years after the launch of Diablo 3, and with the franchise getting the bulk of love on the Blizzcon main stage for the first time in aeons, fans were hopeful for even a tease of a new Diablo.

And Blizzard delivered a mobile game. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was swift.

There's no reason Diablo can't, or won't, offer a substantial experience on the small screen. Dungeon crawlers are one genre that has ported over to mobiles well. Having a single virtual joystick and smaller icons for actions is a pretty common setup for mobile games now: you see it a lot in MOBAs, like Arena of Valor or Vainglory.

But a mobile Diablo was not what fans have been waiting for. So it's not surprising that, at the time of writing, the Diablo Immortal trailer had just under 400 likes, with the dislikes approaching almost 10,000. The cinematic trailer has copped the backlash even harder, with just over 600 likes to around 17,000 dislikes.

Nailed it! Congratulations, Kripparrian, you're a damn oracle.
I've mentioned the toxicity of Diablo III's official forums before, the bitterly divided fanbase of the Diablo franchise as a whole, and the way in which Blizzard's gaslighting of dissatisfied D3 customer contributed to both, so the rapidly escalating backlash against Diablo Immortal isn't surprising to me. Re-releasing basically the same assets to new markets is the only path forward for Blizzard's Diablo franchise at the moment; the only other thing they can do is remasters of the older games in the series, which are probably also in the works.

I'll have to admit, I'm a little curious. If D:I is free2play, I might even check it out. After all, it's not like I have high expectations, or anything; if it's even halfway decent, I'll be pleasantly surprised. The monetization model will matter a lot, obviously, but if it's not pay2win and respects players' time, and if it's playable in something other than online-all-the-time-massively-multiplayer mode (i.e. if the game is playable offline, once it's downloaded and installed), then it even might be a decent enough experience to keep installed. We'll see.

For now, though, I'm just going to sit back and watch the show as Blizzard try to manage an unruly fanbase whose more reasonable and moderate members all decamped to other games' communities years ago... in no small part because Blizzard didn't care about them. GG, Blizzard! Well done.