‘Many of our best developers are now working on new mobile titles across our IPs,’ says Blizzard

Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham has announced that despite the backlash to news of mobile title Diablo Immortal, the developer is looking at bringing more games to mobile devices as a means of reaching "a much broader audience around the world".

Blizzard is experiencing an unprecedented backlash when it closed BlizzCon with the news that Diablo was coming to mobile. Almost 40,000 fans have already added their names to a petition calling on Blizzard to cancel the project, sending Activision-Blizzard’s shares tumbling.

However, at a post-announcement press conference (thanks, Reddit, via PC Gamer and USgamer) Adham told attendees: "Many of us over the last few years have shifted from playing primarily desktop to playing many hours on mobile, and we have many of our best developers now working on new mobile titles across all of our IPs. Some of them are with external partners like Diablo Immortal. Many of them are being developed internally only, and we’ll have information to share on those in the future."

"I will say also that we have more new products in development today at Blizzard than we’ve ever had in our history, and our future is very bright."

Fans flooded social media and r/diablo with criticism of both the announcement and the game itself. One fan stood up in BlizzCon’s Q&A session and asked if the announcement was "an out of season April Fools’ joke", while on YouTube, Blizzard’s official cinematic trailer for Diablo Immortal has (at the time of writing) been "disliked" 561,000 times, balanced with just 21,000 likes.

"For our diehard PC fans, we will say though, we still have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple unannounced Diablo projects," Adham added. "So we haven’t forgotten about them."