I remember talking about the disastrous launch of Warcraft 3: Reforged with Adam on the podcast. It was about as bad as a launch could go, replete with technical issues, poor customer service, and salted wounds. The story was surprising because until then, Blizzard was, in my view, the darling of the video game industry. So, when I learned that not only was the release botched, but they were also relieving dissidents of their accounts, I was floored. I did walk away from the episode thinking that of course Blizzard was going to right this ship. I mean, how could they not?

Fast-forward to 2022 (skipping past a relatively issue free release of Diablo II: Resurrected) and Blizzard has now launched a money suck of a game in Diablo Immortal. This project's story was only slightly worse than Reforged's. It started with the “Do you guys not have phones” debacle from BlizzCon 2018. It ended with a game that required zero dollars to play, but thousands of dollars to master. While Diablo Immortal has raked in millions for Blizzard, it has also alienated many of the franchise's longtime fans, leaving the prospects for the launch of the previously highly anticipated Diablo IV up in the air.

The launch itself is not the end of the story here. When confronted with the fan disdain for the game's clearly predatory business model, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra provided a rationale for the microtransactions while offering little to no context. The ridiculously huge numbers being vacuumed in by this game, when paired with the reports of aggressive in-game marketing, leave much to be desired from an optics perspective.

I gave Diablo Immortal a shot. I loaded it up on my iPad Pro, connected a DualShock 4, and created what I hoped would become the most powerful monk in mobile Sanctuary. I needed to make some adjustments since the game was clearly developed for touch, and the controller scheme was seemingly added as an afterthought. Navigating the menus kind of reminded me of Genshin Impact. Before I had the chance to form that thought, however, a full screen add full of treasure chests, orbs, and dollar signs derailed me. This screen would inject itself into my screen several times during my first session, and eventually became annoying enough to cause me to stop playing and delete the game.

Negative press aside, Diablo Immortal is a mobile game, and those are difficult sells in the PC game space to begin with. Warcraft 3 is a sacred game, but it has aged, and is holy only for die-hard fans of the series. Alone, either one of these counts as a crappy business decision, but even when put together, they are at worst a stumble with a pretty simple recovery path. Blizzard Entertainment has access to plenty of well-loved properties, and any one of them can do wonders to remind their base of the developer's storied past.

This is where Overwatch 2 comes in. Blizzard's newest hero shooter replaced its predecessor, an audible called seemingly late in the development cycle. From a technical perspective, the launch left much to be desired. Long server queues, which are difficult to understand given that this was a swap out, plagued the first few days of play. Career progression also hid behind queue times. Random disconnects jumped from user to user.

Many of the early glitches have been fixed, and the clearing smoke has left a free-to-play spruced up version of the original missing many of the features teased in the original announce trailer, such as hero customization. The new PvP push mode was about all that seemed to make the cut, since the new maps have not yet materialized, at least at the time of this writing. I'm certain that these launch issues will level off. Blizzard has too much invested in this game to allow it to falter for too long.

What I want to focus on is the wager Blizzard has put on free-to-play. I haven't yet seen anything I would consider predatory in Overwatch 2... yet. The Battle Pass business model is not my favorite, but it is successful, and has not sapped wallets quite at the level of any mobile games. However, there is a stigma with these free to play models that speaks to the quality of the game. It starts to seem like the Overwatch brand is cheapened by going free to play. Or maybe it just opens up the game to a much larger audience. Time will tell if this is a good thing.

I try to keep a level head when the gaming community starts indictment proceedings on the industry. I may not like certain business practices, but I have an obsessive need to inject context into conversations around them. Blizzard has had some very public stumbles in its gaming business recently. The personnel harassment issues have clearly self-inflicted, and, although they aren't the subject of this article, must be at least mentioned. In any case, the decision to change up the way they charge for games is going to have both short and long term consequences.

Did Blizzard ruin the Diablo franchise by hitching it to a smartphone money vacuum? Are the business decisions surrounding the Warcraft 3 remaster fatal to Azeroth? Can Overwatch 2 survive its disastrous launch? No matter what the answer is, one thing is certain. Blizzard is no longer the company of old. Much of these changes can be attributed to the Activision merger. After all, 6 billion or so dollars is a lot of money. I just wonder whether it needs to be made up at the expense of Blizzard fans everywhere.

Even still, it would be irresponsible to let the gaming community escape sharing some of this blame. After all, free to play games would fail unless someone was buying into them. From Candy Crush to GTA Online, publishers have been enabled by consumers lining their wallets in search of loot boxes. This feels icky, though. Almost like blaming a drug addict for the actions of the pusher.

What do you think? Are Blizzard's actions of late ruining the reputation of a once beloved developer? If so, who's to blame for this? Let us know in the comments.