Facing the backlash of fans, Blizzard decided to respond to the criticisms, concerns, and theories of Diablo Immortal. Instead of apologizing for their horrendous Q&A session, or the way they presented Diablo Immortal to their PC enthusiast audience, they decided to stand firm and defend their product.

Only after their initial presentation, fans found out that the game wasn’t even being developed by Blizzard. It was was instead being developed by Chinese game company NetEase.

Blizzard has since denied the allegations that Diablo Immortal is simply a re-skin of another Chinese mobile game, Crusaders of Light, claiming that Diablo Immortal is built from the ground up. But don’t be so quick to believe Blizzard as it seems they are trying to hide the negative backlash with every shady tactic they have.

Youtuber YongYea explains in a video how Blizzard removed the initial Cinematic Trailer video post after the onslaught of dislikes. They then re-uploaded the video to try and begin with a clean slate. This of course, failed miserably. The trailer for Diablo Immortal is still suffering from far greater dislikes than likes, but Blizzard’s shady tactics don’t stop there.

YoungYea preceded to look at Blizzard’s Social Blade statistics to find out the number of comments and ratings on the trailer (this after noticing a drop in the number of comments and total ratings on the Youtube video). He discovered that around 110,000 ratings were deleted from the cinematic trailer, and around 80,000 were deleted form the gameplay trailer.

Comments also saw the same deletions with around 20,000 comments being deleted from the cinematic trailer and 6,000 comments being deleted from the gameplay trailer.

Blizzard has still not backed down from their stance that this new mobile game is worth their audience’s time. But Blizzard’s ignorance shines through in the fact that none of the controversy has really been acknowledged.

Blizzards main response to why Diablo fans should try the game has been along the lines of, “We really believe playing is believing, and we would love it if everyone everywhere gets to try it out and give their honest opinions.” Too bad that this is not a reason to try a game out. Telling your fans to simply trust you after you did what you knew they wouldn’t like at an event where PC gamers were the majority of attendees is not the way to win them over.

If you want your fans to respect you Blizzard, don’t delete your comments, don’t delete their ratings, and don’t ignore their wishes.

Most importantly don’t ask them, “Do you not all have phones?”