Following the denial of the FTC’s preliminary injunction, fans wondered if the rumoured Diablo IV launch onto Xbox Game Pass could be imminent, but the President of Blizzard has some bad news.
A few days ago, an image showed up online supposedly showing Diablo IV available on Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass service, leaving fans to wildly speculate it may have been a leak to today’s announcement that the FTC’s preliminary injunction was being denied by a California judge, allowing Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard to proceed. However, even though that decision came true through the courts, the goods aren’t quite ready for Game Pass, as the President of Blizzard, Mike Ybarra, commented on the faked images, stating: “That is not happening.”
While that’s certainly some disappointing news for those hoping to see some of Activision-Blizzard’s titles, like Diablo IV, over on Xbox Game Pass as soon as possible, later, Mike Ybarra deleted the tweet, whether that was due to the decision this morning of the court case dropping or if the potential for the dungeon-crawler to make its way to the subscription service has a chance now. In a follow-up tweet with the streamer Cory “Gothalion” Michael, Ybarra clarified that we “can’t predict the future” but that the leak was, in fact, false.
Microsoft has made a habit of taking nearly everything they make, past, present, and future, and placing it on Xbox Game Pass, so one can only assume that with that shiny, new stable of games just waiting to get hitched up and sent out to pasture, that it’s really only a matter of time before games like Call of Duty, Diablo IV, and World of Warcraft have some sort of presence on the service, so fans shouldn’t be discouraged just yet.
With a service that already boasts juggernauts from Microsoft’s own history, alongside recent acquisitions of ZeniMax Media, Mojang, and King that have brought several other beloved franchises to Xbox Game Pass, the newest addition of Activision-Blizzard to that list makes for a PC brand that will hard to be beaten from an intellectual property standpoint, as well as strong mobile and console outlooks for the future with the Xbox brand becoming synonymous with its Netflix-like, affordable gaming services.
