“You can release something that’d be considered alpha footage here and it’d be a finished game there.”Įventually, Blizzard did end up deciding that they would polish up the game and just release it worldwide in one go.

“The quality bar in the Chinese market, especially for framerate, is extremely low,” they said. It is really for China,” a developer working at Blizzard (who remained anonymous) told Kotaku, being one of three developers who confirmed that Diablo Immortal was originally going to be made available exclusively to Chinese audiences.Īnother large part of the reason for that was that Blizzard felt the Chinese market would be a good place to test the game before they released it in the west, owing to what an anonymous Blizzard employee said is a significantly lower bar for quality in the nation. “Essentially it exists because we’ve heard that China really wants it. Owing to the high demand of a mobile Diablo game by Chinese audiences, Blizzard decided to work in conjunction with NetEase to start a new project based on those demands, which went on to become Diablo Immortal.Īnd their original plan, according to the report, was to release it in China only. As per a report on Kotaku, soon after Diablo partnered with NetEase for the publishing of Diablo 3 in China, they decided to extend that working relationship. Dissatisfaction from the fans, then, isn’t something that is hard to sympathize with.īut as it turns out, originally, the game reportedly wasn’t even meant for global audiences.

It was a poorly handled, poorly timed announcement for a mobile-exclusive game in what has historically been a PC-exclusive franchise. And though the outrage is something that is a bit of an overreaction, it’s not completely misplaced either. Diablo Immortal’s announcement at BlizzCon did not go down well with a large section of Blizzard’s fanbase.

Diablo immortal copy of chinese game