By Joe Skrebels

Ex-Blizzard employee Mark Kern, who worked as a producer on Diablo 2, has blamed the publisher for the Diablo: Immortal backlash.

In a lengthy Twitter thread, the developer said: “I hate to say it, but what you are seeing is Blizzard not understanding gamers anymore.”

Kern’s point is centred around how Blizzard teased and revealed the game, rather than the form of the game itself:

“There is nothing wrong with having a mobile version of Diablo. In fact, I would have wanted one as an option”, he explained. “But the way it was hinted at, and presented, and the failure of Blizzard management to predict the backlash caught me my surprise. Blizzard used to be really gamer driven”.

Kern asserts that by teasing a Diablo announcement – even if we knew that it wasn’t Diablo 4 in advance – it created an expectation for existing PC players that they would see a PC product, leading to “a huge bait-n-switch feeling moment.”

He adds that, in his time at the company, Blizzard would have predicted this kind of response in advance: “Blizzard never used to have to ask, because it was made up of hard core gamers from top to bottom […] I would have had a line of devs outside my door telling me [the Immortal reveal] was a bad move.”

Diablo: Immortal is a massively multiplayer mobile spin-off for the series, being developed in partnership with NetEase.

Its announcement was met with a fan backlash, garnering an unfavourable like/dislike ration for its trailer on YouTube, questions as to whether it was a reskin of a previous NetEase game, and even a question at the Blizzcon Diablo panel asking if Immortal was “an out-of-season April Fool’s joke.”

Blizzard’s Mark Cheng has since responded, saying that he doesn’t “think mobile should be a dirty word”.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s UK News Editor, and he was away all weekend, so coming back to all this has been quite a surprise. Follow him on Twitter.