ALERT: Blizzard Cancels Diablo 3 Release

Early this morning Blizzard made a press release announcing that they will not be releasing Diablo 3 on May 15th. In this unprecedented, shocking and completely unexpected announcement, Blizzard cited staff drama among programmers, art directors and management alike along with systemic issues with the auction house and legal implications of their real-money auction house. Blizzard hopes to release the game by the end of 2012 but says, “2013 won’t come soon enough for our team”.

Diablo 3 Canceled

Now, I’m not sure where to even begin with this one. Blizzard’s defunct staff was unable to “communicate and work together” according to the announcement? This sounds like a high school football team to me, not a subdivision of Activision. Blizzard mentioned that there are systemic issues in their auction house… are they talking about duping in Diablo 3? Did a rogue developer install some sort of backdoor to ensure he’d be able to take full advantage of the real-money system after release? It sounds like it. Legal issues with their real-money auction house? It sounds like they failed to let Uncle Sam know what they were up to. I guess all we have to go on now is speculation until Blizzard releases more information.

Blizzard has a long history of spotless development process. For over a decade they have been pumping out high quality games with brilliant game play, visuals and audio. Their teams has never let on that they are hurrying to make a release deadline. Instead they have continually pushed back deadlines and told the media that their software would be ready “soon“. I guess today is no exception. Blizzard knows that their game is not ready so they are just going to come clean with the public opposed to pushing back deadline after deadline after deadline over the next year. Kudos for that.

I’ve been marginally concerned over the last 6 months of beta testing. Blizzard originally announced a Q4 2011 release for Diablo 3 and has been stalling us all the way up until their March 15th release announcement. Now it makes you wonder how honest they were when they said they could release the game in May.

With duping, cheating and other issues plaguing their progress, they may be calling for an entire refactoring of their back-end code. This is the only explanation for the long delay. As far as staff communication issues, I’m guessing that they are going to have to overhaul their entire team and start from scratch. Good luck Blizzard. We’ll be waiting.

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2 Comments.

  1. Oh my!

    I didn’t fall for it, but that’s one cruel April Fools.

    Good job!

  2. I can’t believe they did this. I just got off the phone with Walmart and sure enough, my order of the Limited Edition has been cancelled – not by Walmart but by Blizzard! UNREAL!

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