Diablo Retrospective

This year’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo had a panel featuring Blizzard’s Matt Householder, Matt Uelmen, and Jay Wilson, during which they talked all things Diablo. This includes the power struggles between Blizzard North and South, Diablo III’s ill-fated auction house, and getting purchased by Activision. And this article over at Pure Diablo serves as a decent summary for those of you not too fond of watching hour-long videos.

So, here’s the panel:

And a quick excerpt from the article:

ACTIVISION ACQUISITION

The Activision acquisition of Blizzard was also discussed and Jay described it as a slowly boiling a frog. It was later on that there was more pressure where Activision were “always talking about the bottom line”. Jay said that Diablo3 wasn’t really affected by that. Activision wanted a free-to-play Diablo really badly which lead to Immortal.