This week, Blizzard released Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, an expansion to the wildly popular fantasy action-role-playing game that tasks players with slaughtering masses of screeching demons and collecting the randomized gear that they leave behind.
Since coming out last year, Diablo IV has been a big success for Blizzard, earning more than $666 million (yes, really) in its first week. But before that release came years of fits and starts, including a predecessor that was perceived within Blizzard as an embarrassment and an iteration that was so drastically different, people began wondering if it was really still Diablo anymore.
Today, Diablo is one of Blizzard’s most important franchises. But to at least one Blizzard executive who was around in its early days, it wasn’t even a “real game.”
My new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, chronicles the entire 33-year saga of the video game company, from the early hit-making days of Warcraft and StarCraft to its merger with Activision to last year’s $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft. This WIRED-exclusive excerpt tells the story of a canceled Diablo III expansion and the Diablo IV that never happened.
At the beginning of 2014, while finishing up Diablo III’s first expansion, Reaper of Souls, the team at Blizzard began talking about what was next. They had been operating under the belief that Diablo III would follow the StarCraft II model—one base game followed by two robust expansions—and they had even started brainstorming what the next expansion might look like. “We were looking at really big ideas, but nothing definitive yet,” said writer Brian Kindregan.
Then, during an all-hands meeting shortly before Reaper of Souls came out, they got news that vacuumed the energy out of the team: Diablo III would not get a second expansion. No matter what happened with Reaper of Souls, they were done. “Getting your next project canceled is scary,” said designer John Yang. There was no clear explanation as to why this was happening—Blizzard’s executives were complimentary of their work on Reaper of Souls and said the decision was not made because of any sort of failure on their part. “None of the answers met the sniff test,” said producer Jeremy Masker.
What they didn’t know was that a host of factors was working against the Diablo team. Chief executive officer Mike Morhaime and the rest of Blizzard’s C-suite saw Diablo III as a failure—a game that had damaged the brand—and several of the executives didn’t think Reaper of Souls would be good enough to turn it around. Morhaime was also feeling pressure from Bobby Kotick and his lieutenants at Activision, who were concerned that the developers in Irvine were trying to work on too many projects at once. And then there was the demonic elephant in the room: Despite its big sales numbers, Diablo III wasn’t equipped to deliver long-term revenue. People only bought the game once, which made it difficult for Blizzard to justify keeping together a team of 100 people to work on ongoing support.
Yet it also seemed absurd to view the game as a misstep. Diablo III was one of the most popular games ever made, to the point where other companies would gripe that their own games’ user counts went down significantly whenever a new Diablo patch came out. “Did it make World of Warcraft money? No,” said director Jay Wilson. “But it made more money than most things that Blizzard makes.” Production director John Hight begged Morhaime and the other executives to wait until they shipped Reaper of Souls to make the call on a second expansion, but it was futile. “The team was devastated,” said one executive. “Not just the Diablo team, but really the whole of development.”