Info from Ex Blizz employee Fabien Serot :Part 2

General Discussion
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Well, since I’ve been bedridden for 4 days, I actually had time to listen to it (though I spaced out a few times.) But there was a lot of interesting info.

  • HotS, was actually the most successful franchise on Twitch. The concistency of viewership was at the top. Twitch really liked HotS. There’s been a lot of speculation in the past about it. It seems most of it was wrong.

  • HotS had the largest dev team of any Blizzard game. The team was larger than WoW’s. So it was at least understantable that at some point, someone would wonder why a game that didn’t bring as much cash as WoW had a larger team, and cut it down. And once that was done, it made no sense to keep funding e-sports for it.

  • In Europe, viewership had been consitently rising until HGC’s cancellation. In fact, all the numbers were going up steadily. Twitch had gotten an exclusivity deal for HotS Esports content in 2018 (it didn’t show anywhere else, and could not be put on Youtube intil 24 hrs after the event) You don’t do that for a declining game. The fact that things were doing so well made it even harder to understand the decision to cut it.

  • Fabien said that it’s better that HGC was cancelled, rather than try to somehow keep things going with 30% of the original budget. It would have put the game in a horrible state, teams would have left, players would have been frustrated etc. Every game at that time were getting cuts, with the exception of Overwatch league.

  • Blizzard has never lost money with HotS. The game was never in the red, and was always profitable. Just not as much as other Blizzard IPs

  • The main goal of Blizzard with HotS was to compete with LoL, and reach for their playerbase. They were releasing as many heroes as they could to catch p with LoL’s roster. HotS 2.0’s skin system was also greatly motivated by having LoL players having acces quickly to close to as many skins as they had in their game.

WC3: Reforged:

  • Fabien was involved with this game as well. At some point during the game’s development, they decided to change the game’s direction. Which meant that a lot of things that were announced for it would not be included. But this was never communicated to the players before the game was released, or internally to employees. Even Blizzard marketing was not told about it. (I believe the product page may still show the wrong info right now)

Activision and Project :Titan

  • I have seen a LOT of players blame activision for a LOT of stuff. Issues with the game, releases, monetisation model etc. The truth is, Blizzard is 90% independent. Activision is almost never involved in decisions, and rarely imposed anything. Project Titan had devs working on it for 10 years, and then it was scrapped. 10 years of development time went out the window, but Activision was never involved. Like Fabien said, they didn’t need help to screw something up. So if you blame Activision for any specific issue, there are 90% chances you’re wrong.

Diablo Immortal:

  • People like us who can afford the last generation consoles, have solid high speed internet connections, with good gaming pcs, we are the minority. For the majority of the world, the best option for gaming is playing on 4G with a 1st generation iphone. Diablo immortal was created for this purpose. It wasn’t filler or anything else people speculated.

  • There originally was supposed to be a Diablo IV teaser following Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon, but for whatever reason, it was pulled out. People think the first Diablo IV announcement was created to calm players down, and was hastily made to try and recoup the reaction to DI. But this isn’t true.

  • The amount of potential players that Blizzard would give up by not going mobile (Billions) meant that Diablo Immortal was going to happen no matter what. It wasn’t a bone thrown until D4 came out.

  • After giving hands on time to several people, D.I. did not get any actual negative comments about the quality of the game. But a lot of reviews were 70% about the fanbase reaction, and 30% on the actual game. Which didn’t help.

HearthStone:

  • Hearthstone was not expected to be successful. The dev team were often told by co-workers that an electronic card game would never work, and the project wouldn’t last long.

  • When the player BlitzChung made his free hong kong comments. The reason he was penalized actually had nothing to do with the Hong Kong protests. Every player sings a contract with Blizzard where they are not allowed to make any religious or political comments. And he was penalized for being in breach of contract. (Casters must follow the same rules)

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Regarding Diablo Immortal, it was still very much a mistake to announce a game to a bunch of people at a convention who weren’t actually the target market for the game. Many of these points give the impression that Blizzard has been shot through with systemic communication failure.

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this news lends better support on the hope that microsoft will revitalize Hots, since then they will own a moba IP and have something for their playerbase that likes mobas (can even throw in stuff like game pass owners get more xp or free skins, etc). I feel like they would reduce the team to something not as big as it was before BUT large enough for a new hero every 2-3 month (i think that is PLENTY fine pace for new heroes), regular balance patches, and skins etc

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Well, the target for Diablo Immortal was, everyone. Blizzcon is funded by Blizzard to be a platform where they announce their products. It made sense for them to announce it there. If you want to reach Diablo fans, it’s the logical place.

The players reaction though didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The more people play Diablo games, the more support the franchise will get in the future. If you’re a diablo fan, there is no downside to this game coming out. It just means you can play Diablo on your phone if you feel like it.

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At the time you’re correct, but Blizzard was known for being a PC studio, so I do understand the fan reaction. I can’t agree that the finished product is benign, DI is full of predatory P2W micro-transactions that put me off even trying the product.

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Blizzcon 2017: Diablo Immortal will be mobile only. Fans got angry and demanded a pc version and got it.

They told us they would not make Immortal P2W. 5 years later it came out and they lied. It was P2W.

Went from: Dont you have phones to dont you have a wallet full of money ?

Fun fact: Early Diablo 3 had action house with both gold and real life money buyout.
It was later on removed but after adding Immortal it was suddenly ok to have microtransactions in a Diablo game.

Sometimes its like they have no clue what they are doing.

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I can’t comment on the system as I have yet to try the game.

But Fabien did mention that it wasn’t realistic for players to expect that only PC titles would be announced. And that there was this view among the priviledged players that any game that wasn’t on next gen console or PC wasn’t a “real” game. But the market has changed, there are triple A mobile titles now ,and any company would be shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring the mobile market.

Also, the first blizzard games were not PC games. Diablo 1 was on Playstation. I don’t know. I just can’t see the logic in how players reacted to it. If they had announced Diablo was turning into a kart game or a date sim I’d understand. But getting angry because a franchise you like also gets a mobile version makes no sense to me.

As mentionned, the Diablo IV announcement had nothing to do with player demands. It was already planned. D4 would have been announced no matter what the reaction to immortal was.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything unusual in having microtransactions in a mobile game. I don’t know any mobile game that doesn’t. I mean, the game is free. If it didn’t have MS, it woiuld just be a net loss for them.

There are microtransactions in Mario Kart too.

Sometimes they don’t.

The reason is simple. Their goal was to compete with LoL. So the game needed to catch up on the number of playable characters and cosmetics in comparison to LoL. So they put tons of people on the team to make it happen.

Fabien explained during the interview that, it is extremely diffucilt to pull a player from a game they are already invested in. (Blizzard should know, that’s how WoW makes money). Because they didn’t want LoL/MobA players to lift their nose at the game for having three times less characters, and less cosmetics (That they would have to re-unlock/ purchase) they put a lot of people to work to meet crazy hero release schedules.

Even to the very end, when they changed tower/fort behavior to target enemies damaging you, it was done to appeal to LoL players.

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By their own admission, it was not. It was for people who enjoyed playing games on their phones. To that point, Diablo had been a PC franchise, and Blizzard had developed for PCs. The people in that room were not people who had any interest in playing games on phones, as evidenced by the reaction.

It would have gone over far better if they had said there was going to be a mobile game announcement, and then at the mobile game announcement, said they had decided to use Diablo, since its mechanics would translate well to a mobile platform. There would have been complaints, but no more so than the amount of complaints that happen whenever Blizzard makes any decision.

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Which is pretty much everyone. PC gamers play games on phone too. I mean, League of Legend: Wild Rift is a mobile game, and LoL players play it. (And Riot fans didn’t make a fuss when it was announced and released). It would not be fair to define the sentence “People who enjoy playing games on phone” as excluding PC gamers. Most gamers that have a commute will play mobile games, on the bus, subway etc.

Incorrect. Diablo 1 was released on console . Every Diablo but Diablo 2 had a console release. (Until Diablo 2: ressurected) But honestly, that point is moot anyway. Blizzcon is not, and was never intended as a PC game event. It’s simply a blizzard centric event where they announce their stuff with a monopoly on the attention.

Personally, I think the reaction is entirely due to these people feeling entitled. I mean, what the hell difference does it make that a mobile game was released?

Really, gamers are crybabies.

-OMG, someone might unlock more stuff than me… in the future…, I demand compensation… for my free stuff.

-OMG, a game requirement that I already completed will be made easier? Unacceptable, everyone should have a hard time! Revert it.

-OMG, this game where I can get everything for free doesn’t give me my free stuff fast enough!

WE ARE TERRIBLE!

Plus, you can be disapointed that the game you wanted wasn’t announced, but sending tons of hate mail and toxic comments on social media to Wyatt Cheng? I mean, why? It’s not even his call.

Yeah, maybe that would have been better, at least expectations wouldn’t have been as high, though we have the benefit of hindsight.

Remember though that it was supposed to be followed by a Diablo IV teaser, so maybe once the teaser was pulled, it was too late to change the message. We’ll never know.

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This just sent me :rofl:

OWL was a colossal flop. Iirc, it undershot profit expectations by literally an order of magnitude, and Twitch’s deal to host the first season of OWL literally cost them more to host than they made in profit.
By every metric I’ve ever seen, and even further by what Serot described, HGC was far more successful than OWL has ever been. In fact, almost every other major Blizzard venture at the time was more successful, and yet the prized bulls all either got the axe or shoved to the back of the stables while the lamed steer keeps getting money thrown at it even now.

Only thing I can thing of to explain that is that Activision has historically made the majority of its money off of low-quality FPS games, so perhaps there’s some bias among their execs and officers in favor of any FPS game over any higher-quality game of any other kind.

This is something other former Blizz devs have commented on indicating the opposite.
Of course, they rarely reported that Activision made overruling calls with regard to any specifics of Blizzard’s games, but we know for a fact that Acti/Blizz officers (the majority of whom were promoted from positions in Activision, not Blizzard) would often pushing for cost-cuts, rushed target dates, and in general greater profit margins at the expense of game quality. This overbearing culture of demanding more-with-less Activision officers brought with them 100% had cascading effects on more specific decisions by Blizzard employees, who found themselves forced to work within increasingly constrained budgets and timetables.

So while it may be true that you cannot blame Activision officers for making those specific calls, it is beyond fair to assign them a significant amount of blame for those calls being made.

This argument would make a lot more sense if D:I didn’t turn out to be a massive P2W scam, with a significant amount of progression locked behind dumping quite literally hundreds or thousands of dollars into the game. To max out a character, it costs upwards of $500,000, potentially even into the millions of USD. https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-requires-500000-dollars-max-character/

And this is a game with PvP in it, not just a PvE grinding game, so players who don’t pay up effectively end up being punished for it if they try to play PvP.

We can’t say whether broader economic access to the Diablo Franchise was the driving idea behind the initial inception of D:I, but it certainly didn’t stay that way.

This is a matter of official technicality lending plausible deniability.

Technically, yes, BlitzChung did violate his contract, which is what allowed them to punish him for it.
But the question is whether the punishment would have been carried out (or at least have been as severe as it initially was) without the pressure from the Chinese govt.

Would Acti/Blizz care enough to do anything if an Armenian “raised awareness” of Azerbaijan’s current military aggression towards Armenia?
How about a Kurdish player of Turkey’s oppression of the Kurds?
How about a North Korean expatriate?
A Native American about the theft and desecration of their ancestral land by fossil fuel companies?
An LGBTQ player about housing discrimination?

Where lays the line between what is, by-definition, political and what is considered “political” enough to count as offending conduct?
Or, more importantly in BlitzChung’s case, WHO gets a say in deciding where that line lies?

The reality is that the “no politics” clause of their contract is entirely designed to avoid costing them viewers/players, because that would ultimately cost them money. But if they think that a certain kind of political speech is profitable, or at the very least not unprofitable, they’re likely to let it slide even if it violates their rules. After all, they don’t have to enforce every rule, they just have the right to.
In BlitzChung’s case, the political and financial power carried by the CCP meant that allowing his violation to slide would have been very expensive, possibly losing them the entirety of China’s absolutely massive market.
That is the real reason behind them deciding to enforce their rules against BlitzChung where they’d let others slide for different political speech in the past.

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Again, I haven’t played the game. But I would assume you can play fine without maxing out a character. (My chars in previous Diablo games were never maxed out. I just didn’t have the time. But I could still play the game fine)

I haven’t seen any numbers on PvP, so I can’t comment on that either.

It’s a breach of contract. There is no way anyone could do that and not get actionned. Besides, pretty much every company who sponsors their E-sports have the same clauses. There are also words you’re not allowed to say. One caster had accidentally dropped and F-word, and his sponsoship was immediately dropped. No one cared about that one though.

It doesn’t matter how it’s framed. Anyone mentionning religion or politics will get penalized. The only differense is, if you’re the first to do it, you may be made an example.

Well, you’re free to doubt of course, but which event in the past are you referring to?

I personally believe Fabien’s explanation, as there is no way any company would allow one player to set a precedent. They didn’t care about anything he said outside the event. The guy knew full well he was breaching his contract. I think people are too quick to jump on the “big companies are bad” bandwagon.

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I wanted to jump in and react with some snarky remarks. Thanks for the recap Phase.

Well, I would agree on some level. They needed archeologists and scientists to reverse engineer the code from SC to be used for a new game with high quality character models each with unique animations, art, and spells.
WoW is probably still rocking 6 polygons on recycled animations and frames. When I was playing WoW, I was actually stunned that maybe 1 enemy would have new animations per expansion.

Whenever I hear this, the game released messed up. Companies still haven’t learned.

Huh. This was a natural response when they got no D4 news. D:I was made specifically to make money on the cellular market. Even though Blizz treats this game as semi-cannon. Cellphone games are huge in China, because it’s part of their culture to show off their status.

They weren’t giving up anything. They were just gaining more customers with an IP that shouldn’t have been used for this purpose. They would still make the same amount on D4 with or without D:I.

There are such things as review copies that don’t reflect the end product. Many games show one thing that seems amazing and then afterwards, without telling anyone, they would add things like P2W. This is what happened here, with about 99% certainty.
Plenty of companies try and circumvent the ESRB with this tactic.

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If it were everyone, it wouldn’t have been booed. What was unfair was defining “PC Gamers” as “People who enjoy playing games on a phone.” Likewise, I don’t define “basketball fans” as “people who enjoy watching football,” even though there’s a lot of overlap.

When a series has been strictly PC and you wish to change it, the best marketing strategy is to first announce that you’re branching out beyond the PC market, then to tell people which franchises they can expect to see cross over. Otherwise, people will anticipate the product they’ve come to expect.

As well claim that it would have been a good idea to announce “Starcraft News” at Blizzcon and then have a presentation about the brand new Starcraft cereal, with Nova-shaped marshmallows!

PC gamers eat breakfast cereal, but they don’t go to Blizzcon to find out about it.

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Call them whatever you like; the point remains. They were not expecting a mobile release, nor did they want it. They were expecting to hear that Blizzard was devoting resources to something they would play on their desktop.

Good point. It would be more fair, then, to say that what was expected was a concurrent PC release.

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Actually, I’d say they’d slap down hard on any of these. Once your company gets associated with any politics, you’re stuck in a mess you don’t want and have to keep diverting resources to. Keeping everybody quiet regardless of position makes it easier to defend any one action: “It doesn’t matter what our personal opinions are; this is our company policy.”

It’s simpler, cleaner, and more defensible.

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Cell games are huge in so many parts of the world. I mean, if it was just China, it still would be worth doing anyway. But it’s much bigger. South America, Brazil, India, Africa etc.

I can’t see why Diablo shouldn’t have been used for mobile. It’s the same argument as people saying “Overwatch characters shouldn’t be in HotS”. The entire point of creating a franchise is that you can branch it out wherever you want. There are mobile games for Mario, Final Fantasy and Sonic.

But yeah, not making a mobile game means giving up on the mobile market.

I think you should look at the numbers for revenue generated by tripla A mobile titles. Compare that to any stand alone full price game. There is no way, a single rpg would generate the same revenue as that game plus a mobile game. It’s impossible.

Otherwise, Riot would never have bothered making Wild rift, if they could have the same profits with no further investment.

I’ve seen footage from the game that was given to review. Fan was playing it on his stream. Nothing about the gameplay has changed as far as I can see.

I think this is a case where most people bashing the game haven’t actually played it.

No one has done that? Some people who play phone games are also PC gamers. They never said anything about them being defined as phone gamers.

Diablo was never strickly PC.

Anyway, I don’t represent Blizzard, so there’s no point arguing with me :slight_smile:
You can email them your feedback that you don’t like them putting their franchises on mobile. If they get enough of it I guess they won’t do it in the future. (Though, I personally don’t see how that’s a benefit to us.)

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I actually started playing so I can make my own opinion and check what the fuss is about. Only played about 30 minutes, but Xul being there earns some brownie points.

Imgur

And I’m intrigued as to who Skarn is. I like the astethics of his design.

More to come.

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Yeah, his argument is rather silly and really shows his lack of understanding in how demographics work. It’s like thinking a bunch of boomers are going to get excited about TikTok just because they can watch CNN or FOX content on it. It doesn’t matter that’s where the trend is going, it’s what that particular target demographic expects and wants.

Blizzard has primarily been a PC company, that’s their claim to fame, and that’s by far what most of their fans have grown up playing. Almost all of my friends tried Diablo3 even though many of us didn’t like it, almost none of them tried Immortal. That isn’t to say it wasn’t or can’t be successful as a pay to win mobile game, it’s just not what people expected.

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I agree on some level. The other countries don’t have much of a choice since gaming there is unrealistically expensive. Having a phone is by necessity and getting a game or two on it , is no big deal.

It can be used for mobile when the franchise is being taken seriously. What I meant was that they shouldn’t have used the Diablo name for a P2W garbage fire. I would’ve bought the game for mobile if it was what it was when they teased it with their demo at Blizzcon.

Yes, if you compare it that way, you are correct. If D4 was made and D:I was never made, D4 would still make the same money. Same scenario with D:I.

I totally agree with you that mobile prints money on some of the most low effort games I have ever seen. Why shouldn’t Blizz drag the Diablo name through the cesspool of gaming? There is money to be had!

Key word here: Gameplay; is a watered down version of D3. I don’t have to play it to know this. BUT what was his point of view on all the P2W mechanics, currencies, and paywalls? (Not that I really care what Fan has to say.) Were they even in the review copy he got? Because none of the P2W mechanics were in the demo they showed at Blizzcon. After Blizzcon, D:I releases with no other news about what’s in it beforehand.

My qualm with D:I is the predatory practices. Everything else seems ok; Graphics, gameplay, the little nuggets of story to round out characters, it’s all nice.

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The main difference from pre-release reciews to launch is what things influence “character power” (cp). Maxroll (a site for diablo guides) probably made the biggest mark by explaining the difference on how limited p2w was before launch (when theyvhad early release) and how that was changed; due to the change, they protested the p2w aspect to the game and removed D:I guides from their site.

The mechanics themselves are a staple of mobilw games, but having the almost cash-only gems heavily boost cp created a powergap some players don’t want in their computer games.

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