Blizzard is censoring the cinematic announcement trailer – are they shooting themselves in the leg?

WCCFTech published a screenshot about how Blizzard is modifying statistics: while Socialblade showed 146K dislikes when the video had 802K views, the YouTube page showed only 62 thousand. At 1.5 million views, 320K dislikes became 215K. (We just checked the YouTube statistics: 2.82 million views, 15700 likes, and 397186 dislikes – GG!)

The comments are getting the shaft, too – RedPill Shark’s comment has been removed no less than sixteen times. It says „No King Rules Forever My Son. I have loved the last 20 years in Blizzard worlds. I will never forget killing my first zergling, alas you have changed and so we must part ways. Goodbye.” The comments were copied by many others to avoid easy deletion (the memory is about something else, but the first part of the comment is the same), but let’s face it. Censorship is meaningless here. (They can’t censor our site – it’s not YouTube!)

Dan Elggren, Diablo Immortal‘s production director, and Allen Adham, Blizzard‘s co-founder, continue to defend at maximum level – this time, they did so in their interview with DigitalTrends: „How long has it been on our minds? Well, if you think about it, we’ve had not only Diablo but all of our franchises, we’ve been talking about mobile and what’s the right experience on a mobile platform. We’ve been working on this for a while. And we’re continuing some broader initiative,” Elggren said.

„A few years ago with Hearthstone, it was designed originally for desktop, but as a happy sort of coincidence, it worked well for mobile, that opened our eyes to a broader opportunity. Then it’s just been a question of surfacing the teams and resources and designs to make this happen. I can say, without getting overly specific, that we have big plans for the mobile space. It’s a big initiative for us across Blizzard, and you can expect to see more mobile titles from us spanning all of our IPs at some point in the future,” Adham added.

So, Blizzard bit the iOS/Android hook after Hearthstone’s success, but sending a mainly PC-based franchise (with a constant Internet connection no less…) to mobile like this isn’t the best way it seems…

Source: WCCFTech, DualShockers