In a new interview, the Blizzard CEO J. Allen Brack discusses numerous Blizzard topics and touches on what’s in store for the Diablo franchise.
J. Allen Brack is now at the helm at Blizzard and his first BlizzCon last year didn’t exactly go to plan with the announcement of Diablo Immortal for mobiles. As well as touching on what’s in store for the company under his guidance, he also talks more about Diablo with Forbes.
Here are a few snips from the lengthy article specific to Diablo. On monetisation…
Wyatt [Cheng] is the person who did the announcement for Diablo: Immortal, and he was one of the top systems designers on Diablo IIIand on Reaper of Souls. He also worked on World of Warcraft encounters before that. So he’s been a Blizzard designer for more than 10 years, probably almost 15 years, deeply involved with the Diablo universe. How are we gonna make sure that this is a Blizzard game? By making it a Blizzard game. How are we gonna make sure that it monetizes and has the right Blizzard values? By making sure it has the right Blizzard values in our monetization. It’s going to have our name on it.
Here’s Brack on getting a mobile game ahead of a new PC Diablo…
I think we saw a little bit of that when we announced that Diablo III was gonna come to console as well. There was a lot of fear and suspicion around that decision. I think that if you look at the industry as a whole, I think many people have had–and this depends on your age and how long you’ve had a mobile phone–many people have had a dream of being able to have an awesome, fun gaming experience on their device that they have with them all the time. As phones become more sophisticated and become more powerful, I think the desire to have a Blizzard-quality mobile experience has continued to increase in, certainly our minds, and I think the minds of fans as well.
So, if you think about the work we did with Hearthstone to try to bring that to phone, that’s sort of step one. This is sort of step two. And frankly, there will be other steps, because we believe in mobile as a platform for gaming in the future. That doesn’t mean that we don’t mean that we don’t believe in console gaming as a platform for the future. We certainly do. That doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in PC gaming as a platform for the future. We certainly do.
Check out the full J. Allen Brack interview here.