If anyone was hoping for anything major from Blizzard Entertainment this year, don’t get your hopes up. On the same earnings call where they announced that they were cutting the workforce by 8%, Activision Blizzard CFO Dennis Durkin stated that Blizzard themselves doesn’t have any major AAA titles planned for 2019, and that they should have low expectations for first quarter of the year. This more or less confirms that the company isn’t planning to launch the long awaited Diablo 4 which many fans were expecting to see this past BlizzCon.
Instead we got the announcement for Diablo Immortal for the mobile platform, and to say that fans weren’t happy is an understatement. While the company is planning on releasing World of Warcraft:Classic and Warcraft III: Reforged this Summer, the fact that their aren’t any other long term projects that will see the light of day in 2019 does not bode well for the developer.
Yet for some reason, on the exact same conference call, COO Coddy Johnson stated that their were multiple Diablo projects in the works. Obviously this includes Diablo Immortal, but the others remain a mystery. Johnson also mentioned in the call that the Diablo teams will “grow substantially” throughout the year. These past 24 hours haven’t been the greatest for Activision Blizzard, and this newest development doesn’t help their situation. Hopefully they can get the ball rolling sooner than later on those projects, but for the time being, they won’t be releasing any of them this year.
Published: Feb 13, 2019 05:23 pm