Blizzard feels the pressure to keep Diablo players happy

An interview with Diablo's Rod Fergusson about IV, III, II, "antiquated" battle passes, and not discussing their most famous player. PLUS: Helldivers’ lead developer explains a tweet.

Blizzard’s Rod Fergusson at the 2025 DICE Summit, reflecting on Diablo IV’s rocky launch. The game is in a much better place these days. Photo: AIAS/Kinser Studios.

Rod Fergusson, the general manager of Blizzard’s Diablo series, knows how all of his company’s Diablo games are doing.

“I have a franchise dashboard that shows me the daily active users across all of the active games,” he told me a few weeks ago in Las Vegas at the DICE Summit.

“It's cool to see, as things change on the weekend or when something gets released or a season gets reset.”

He can see a surge of players arrive for a new season of 2023’s Diablo IV, the newest entry of Blizzard’s popular ongoing sagas about killing monsters and demons from a bird’s eye view.

Fergusson’s dashboard isn’t in real-time. Other people at Blizzard look at that. His data comes from the day before.

It nevertheless delivers key insights into what people are playing, and what makes them play more.

It helped Fergusson see a boost in players for the 2022 mobile game Diablo Immortal, simply when they announced a road map of future content (that’s one of the reasons he wants to release a roadmap for Diablo IV).

It has shown him that 2021’s Diablo II Remastered still has a “very healthy” player base.

And it has supported his sense that players of Diablo III, released in 2012, have moved on to Diablo IV. “We have more Diablo II Resurrected players than Diablo III right now,” he said. He believes players of III migrated to IV as the newer game’s ongoing seasons have added more features from the older one.

All of this data across all of these games is crucial for Fergusson and his team, as they try to manage the trickiest of tasks for anyone operating a live game: figuring out what players want, when to listen to them and how to turn that listening into action.

There’s also the challenge of deciding who to listen to.