I follow Diablo 4 and its community quite closely, and I can tell you that Blizzard certainly isn’t a stranger to some unusual announcements. Recently, however, I came across what may be its wildest one yet. Over on the game’s social channels, the developer announced that Diablo now has an official… WhatsApp group!?
Yes, just like the ones you have with your friends that you definitely check on regularly, Blizzard wants to slide into your WA inbox to send you some news about the ARPG. My question is… why?
Look, I am not trying to dunk on some poor communication manager who now needs to add WhatsApp to their list of channels they’re going to use to disperse some hot Diablo 4 updates. But is WhatsApp really the best way to get that message across?
Depending on where you are in the world, you either use WhatsApp every day, or only to speak to those friends who left the country years ago. If you’re in the former camp, you’ll be quite aware of how it has turned from a simple chat app that unites everyone you know – regardless of their carrier/phone maker – into a sort of catch-all app for chatting and business.
You can use it to order food, send/receive documents, and share your location with delivery people who insist on not reading the provided address. Recently, however, it has taken on something of a new form as a sort of RSS feed reader and all-around announcement (?) aggregator.
The sort of seasonal sale and new collection texts you used to get on your number from your local clothes store now sit in your WhatsApp inbox; all of them most certainly muted. Shop anywhere and you’re asked for your number, so that you’re forever locked into a contract of always having to hear about, well, anything the shop you bought something from once wants to tell you about.
That sort of unsolicited outreach has rarely been useful for me, but I can see the appeal from the businesses’ perspective; it’s a direct way of advertising to your existing customer base without having to email/call them or chase them down some other way. It’s also convenient; if there’s some place you regularly shop at – say, a grocery store – it’d be helpful to know that the expensive international treats you’ve had your eye on are 80% off because they expire in four weeks.
I can’t say I quite see the point of having one for a video game. Yes, Diablo is a major franchise, and signing up likely means you’re going to get updates from Diablo 4, Immortal, Diablo 2: Resurrected, Diablo 3 and whatever other thing that happens to involve Diablo, but is that really the type of timely news you want in your inbox?
The timing of this announcement is especially bizarre, too. Blizzard just revealed a roadmap of content coming to Diablo 4 over the course of 2025, and that thing might be the most sorry excuse for a roadmap I’ve seen for a live service game. Not only is it devoid of anything major worth looking forward to, it also lists barely anything we didn’t already know about. Suffice to say, it’s not exactly been going down well in the game’s various communities.
Diablo 4 will continue getting seasons every three months or so (shocker!), leading up to the release of the next expansion sometime in 2026. I get that pushing the expansion out of 2025 – something that goes against the original plan of one expansion per year – meant that the team would more less be treading waters, but what’s the point of a roadmap if… you already know where you’re going?
I can’t help but wonder if I’m looking too deep into this. The timing may be off, but Blizzard probably didn’t put that much thought into it. To a marketing person, WhatsApp is just another “social network” where a section of the Diablo audience exists, so it’s one the developer is willing to expand into in order to reach them.
At the time of this writing, the channel has over 1,300 followers, which is pretty decent – though obviously nowhere near as massive as Diablo’s following on other social media platforms. I’m really curious, though, of the people who follow it: how many of them are actually clicking the WhatsApp icon on their phone to catch up with Diablo news? And are they going to get anything of value that they coulnd’t otherwise get elsewhere?
Let’s see if this is where Blizzard ends this experiment. I can’t imagine how… unholy…. an Overwatch 2 WhatsApp could end up being.