The state of Diablo

If there's one good thing to come out of Blizzard's Diablo Immortal fiasco, it's been the piercing of the near-mythical mystique of Blizzard themselves. People have been believing the hype for a long time now, where Blizzard are concerned, in part because Blizzard hadn't shown many signs of vulnerability, or of fallibility, for years. But no longer: Blizzard have gone from a company that seemingly could do no wrong, to a company that may well be as out-of-touch and clueless as any other AAA publisher, and becoming more so with each passing day, all in almost no time at all.

It's a stunning fall from grace, one that nobody saw coming, and it was accompanied by a stunning drop in the company's share price. With the mystique evaporating, people are starting to ask questions. Actual reporting is starting to happen; reporters are starting to dig beneath the Blizzard veneer. And the results are turning out to be rather surprising, to say the least, even for someone like me, who has know since Diablo III's release in 2012 that Blizzard were rather more clueless and out-of-touch than everyone believed.

Case in point: a sweeping and detailed piece on the past, present, and future of Diablo, penned by Jason Schreier, which involved interviewing "11 current and former Blizzard employees, all of whom spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to press." That's right, folks, it's actual, investigative journalism, finally being brought to bear on one of the sacred cows of the video gaming industry.

So, what did Schreier find? Well, long story short, it's looking like Jonathan Rogers' speculation, that Blizzard hadn't announced D4 yet simply because its cancellation is still a very real possibility, may be closer to the mark than anyone knew.

So with Fenris [D4's current code name] fairly early in development—and with the fourth Diablo already having gone through one big reboot—it’s fair to wonder if the team was worried about another lengthy development cycle that might end in disaster. Even the words “Diablo IV” might have set expectations that the developers didn’t want to establish just yet. “The Diablo team is very paranoid about saying something too soon and then getting stuck in a loop,” said one former Blizzard developer. “They don’t want to show the game until they have a trailer, a demo.”

“Obviously Titan looms over all of us,” said another former Blizzard developer. Despite Overwatch’s emergence from Titan’s ashes, the developer added, “people don’t look at Titan and see a success.“

“Our preference is to have a clear announcement plan with some concrete details and hopefully a playable demo of the game when we announce.” - Blizzard spokesperson

“I think there’s a desire to announce stuff within a reasonably close proximity to when people are gonna get to play it,” said a current Blizzard developer, pointing to both Titan and Blizzard’s other infamously canceled project, StarCraft: Ghost. “[Those] just set people up for a lot of disappointment.”

In a statement, Blizzard confirmed as much. “In terms of unannounced games, so much can change over the course of development based on how we’re feeling about the progress and direction of the project,” the company said. “So we try not to share details about unannounced projects before we’re ready. Our preference is to have a clear announcement plan with some concrete details and hopefully a playable demo of the game when we announce. That applies to our Diablo projects and our other games as well.”

This is just one small portion of a very long, and apparently very well-sourced, piece. Among other revelations to emerge from Schreier's reporting:

• Diablo III's second expansion was cancelled even before Reaper of Souls' sales numbers were known:

“The perception overall was that management thought, ‘This team really screwed up,’” said one person who was there. “They could’ve held off a few months and seen how Reaper did, but in their mind [Diablo III] was irredeemable.” (When Reaper launched on PC in late March, 2014, Blizzard said it sold 2.7 million copies in its first week—a big number, but only a fraction of the ~15 million copies that Diablo III had sold across PC and consoles.)

• The impression that Diablo III fans have been operating under for two years now, i.e. that the D3 dev team had basically been scattered to the winds at Blizzard, and the game was basically just in maintenance mode, was 100% accurate:

“At the point they had the strongest Diablo development team ever, they scattered them all to the winds,” said one person who worked on Reaper of Souls. To those developers, it was a baffling move by Blizzard’s management. Giving the team more time to see how Reaper performed and how the second expansion was shaping up “would’ve been much more Blizzard-like,” that person said.

• Diablo IV's first incarnation, as envisioned by then-director Josh Mosqueira, would have looked very, very different than any other Diablo title:

Mosqueira and team designed Hades [D4's code name at that time] as a Diablo take on Dark Souls, according to three people familiar with the project. It would be a gothic, challenging dungeon crawler. Rather than maintain the isometric camera angle of the first three Diablo games, it would use an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective. It was such a departure from previous games, some at Blizzard thought they might not even end up calling it Diablo IV. From 2014 until 2016, it was Team 3’s main project, developed alongside a handful of patches and light content updates for Diablo III. Then, like Diablo III’s second expansion before it, Hades was canceled.

• Whether "Hades" was cancelled after Mosqueira left Blizzard, or whether Mosqueira left Blizzard because "Hades" was cancelled, is unknown, but the two events happened at more or less the same time.

As with any cancellation, there were likely many reasons for this move, but two people involved with Hades said it was going through rocky development. “It was not shaping up at all,” said one. In the middle of 2016, Mosqueira left Blizzard. It’s not clear whether Mosqueira left because of Hades’ cancellation or if Hades was canceled because he left, but what’s certain is that at that point, the project was shelved. (When reached by Kotaku, Mosqueira declined to comment on this story.)

• D4's new direction, "Fenris," is still very much in flux, and heading in a very MMO direction:

Fenris is still early in development, and likely won’t be out until 2020 or later, so it’s safe to say that many decisions made by the team today will change over time. (We don’t know if it’s PC-first or planned for simultaneous launch on PC and consoles, and in fact, the team may have not yet made that decision.) One ongoing conversation, for example, has been whether to keep the isometric camera angle or use the over-the-shoulder third-person view that was prototyped for Hades. Recent builds of the game have been isometric, like previous Diablo games, according to three people familiar with Fenris, but questions remain over whether that should change.

Another pillar of Fenris is to make Diablo more social, taking inspiration from Destiny to add what one current Blizzard developer called “light MMO elements,” further drawing on Blizzard’s past massively multiplayer online success. Previous Diablo games have featured hub cities full of computer-controlled quest-givers and vendors—imagine if, while exploring those hubs, you could meet and group up with other players? And then what if you could go off and take on instanced dungeons with them, sort of like Destiny’s strikes or World of Warcraft’s instances?

“The question that kept getting asked is, ‘If there’s going to be a ‘strike’ equivalent, where you’re forced into a very story-focused, well-designed level of a dungeon, what does that look like in Diablo?” said one person familiar with the project. “What if we still had a core Diablo game that just happened to have a bunch of people on the map to do other cool stuff?”

• The question of whether D4 will implement "live service" monetization is apparently already decided, but nobody at Blizzard has any idea exactly what sort of gacha will be deemed acceptable by Diablo fans:

Blizzard’s other big games, like Overwatch and Hearthstone, include ongoing revenue streams thanks to cosmetic microtransactions and card packs. With Diablo, Blizzard has not yet found a way to deliver that same sort of cash generator. (“The company’s always struggled as to how to have some sort of long-tail monetization for Diablo III,” acknowledged one former employee.) From what we’ve heard, those decisions are still up in the air on Fenris, and may not be clear for a long time.

That sure sounds like development hell to me; if it's all accurate, then D3 fans will be lucky to see a D4 announcement at next year's BlizzCon, assuming the game doesn't get cancelled entirely.

One bit of the Blizzard mystique seems to still be intact, though. Throughout the piece, Schreier continually refers to Reaper of Souls in glowing terms, as "beloved" and "triumphant," in spite of the fact that some very simple napkin math is all you need to see through that bit of PR bullshit.

While Blizzard have played fast and loose with D3's sales numbers for years, if you keep a couple of milestones in mind, and work with the numbers that they have released, then a pattern emerges pretty quickly. 

Let's follow the bouncing ball:

1. D3 had a huge launch, selling 14.5 million units in its first year on PC. Most of those sales (10 million of them) happened in the first month, though, and by November of 2013, D3's console launch had only pushed the total from 14.5 million to 15 million -- essentially nothing. That's the opposite of a "long tail" -- D3's sales basically stopped dead.
2. Reaper of Souls moved 2.7 million units by the end of its launch week, but by the end of Q2 of that year, Blizzard was redefining what "Reaper of Souls" meant when reporting their sales numbers to shareholders. By considering everyone who's bought the base game to be a "Reaper of Souls customer," Blizzard was able to add the base game's 15 million in sales to the expansion's sales to report 18 million units in total sales across all SKUs, and across all platforms, since May of 2012, which means that RoS's sales also stopped dead at about the 3 million mark.
3. The next milestone was the game's launch in China, where Blizzard and NetEase signed up 9 million players for the base game, 3 million of which went on to buy the expansion. 9 million plus 3 million equals 12 million; and 12 million plus 18 million (from step 2) equals 30 million, which was the next sales number that Blizzard reported for D3/RoS.

Blizzard haven't said anything about D3/RoS's sales since then; given the pattern to this point, I think it's safe to call that a clear indication that there haven't been any to speak of. If so, then Diablo III has only "sold" 24 million units (although with the base game being free in China, describing those as sales may not be entirely accurate), and its expansion pack has sold only 6 million units, with no further sales after the launches in both cases -- D3's base game only added to its 15 million total by re-launching the game in the Middle Kingdom.

Also, with only 6 million units sold, of a possible 24 million, the Reaper of Souls expansion pack is hardly "triumphant," and with 75% of Diablo III customers having decided that they weren't interested in RoS at all, describing it as "beloved" seems like a stretch. With no long tail in evidence, and 75% of their fans having headed to the hills, so to speak, Blizzard's decision to cancel D3's second expansion isn't inexplicable, so much as inevitable.

It also bodes ill for the future of the Diablo franchise. When Diablo III launched, millions of fans of the franchise had been starving for a new Diablo installment for fifteen years; again, Blizzard don't talk about Diablo II's total sales numbers, but the last estimate that I saw had roughly 17.5 million units sold for each of D2's base game, and its Lord of Destruction expansion pack. For those keeping track, that's 35 million units in total, using Blizzard's "Reaper of Souls customer" methodology, which would mean that D3 actually lost fans, rather than growing the franchise, and seems to suggest that D4 is only to benefit from, at most, a 6 million strong built-in fan base.

No wonder they're trying to expand that by making fans of new customers. It remains to be seen whether D3's Eternal Collection sells any better on the Nintendo Switch than the Ultimate Evil Edition sold on PS4 and XBOne, or than the D3 base game sold on PS3 and XB360, but there's little to no evidence so far that Diablo has achieved any significant penetration into the console market. When fans describe Diablo as a PC franchise, they're not wrong; to say that Diablo Immortal has a hill to climb, in order to change that, is something of an understatement.

So, what's the state of Diablo? Based on what I'm seeing, I'd describe it as uncertain. 

By some criteria, Diablo III has been a resounding success; 30 million units sold is absolutely an enormous accomplishment. The only problem is that D3's sales success came at the expense of the franchise's long-term viability; Blizzard didn't so much sell 30 million units of D3 and RoS, as cash out their Diablo fanbase, with no clear plan in place for what to do next.

Diablo's remaining fans have clearly spoken: they do not want a mobile game, and with 90% of D3's sales coming on PC, there's no evidence that Diablo's appeal extends any further than those PC playing Diablo afficionados, either. Add in the terrible PR of a bungled launch, and Diablo Immortal will likely be dead on arrival, which means that Diablo IV is the only future the franchise has.

And that's a problem, because 75% of Diablo fans hated the direction in which D3 took the franchise, and none of those fans will come back for Blizzard's "live service" exploitation iteration of the property. Diablo fans do not want Dead Souls in the Diabloverse, either, or Destiny in the Diabloverse; given that ActiBlizz's Destiny franchise is also under-performing, I have no idea why anyone from Blizzard would be assuming that's a good idea, anyway. If Diablo IV still looks like either of these things, then it will also fail.

Meanwhile, competing titles like Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Lost Ark, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, Torchlight: Frontiers, Warhammer: Chaosbane, and Last Epoch are evolving the ARPG genre well past anything that Blizzard have managed to accomplish. Blizzard's contemptuous tone towards their own fans ("Do you not have phones?" is only the most recent example) sent a very clear message to 75% of Diablo fans: that Blizzard didn't care about them, or about what they thought about the direction of the franchise. Blizzard told their own fans that they didn't matter to Blizzard, and most of those fans took the hint; they left for other games, and with the ARPG genre finally evolving away from the deadlock of Diablo II's genre template, there's just no reason for them to come back.

On the plus side, though, D3 is finally getting some match-making improvements... six years after launch. In a game that was allegedly built from the ground up for online-only multiplayer. Gee, I can't imagine why Diablo fans are still touchy about MMO-lite features in the Diablo franchise.

Blizzard make some pretty good games; Overwatch and Hearthstone are popular for good reasons. But they've dug themselves a deep, deep hole where their Diablo franchise used to be, and seem to have no fucking clue why Diablo fans ever liked the games, so I have my doubts that they can recover the situation. Personally, I think Blizzard have finally managed what 25 years of Diablo players haven't been able to do: they've finally, permanently, killed Diablo. The corpse just hasn't stopped twitching, yet.

Jason Schreier's piece, BTW, is excellent, and includes far more interesting information than the tidbits that I've quoted here. If you're at all interested in the Diablo franchise, or the history of the ARPG, or the ongoing changes at Blizzard overall, or just better video game journalism, then I'd say it's a must-read. Go give the man some clicks. Tell him I sent you.