Blizzard Co-Founder and Diablo Co-Creator Says AAA Is in a Brutal Moment—Every Diablo 4 Move Feels Like a Minefield
Two decades later, the landscape is unrecognizable — the rules have shifted, the players have changed, and the stakes are higher than ever.
Big-budget games are in a squeeze right now, and even one of the guys who helped invent Diablo is feeling it. David Brevik, Blizzard co-founder and Diablo co-creator, just laid out how rough the landscape has gotten: layoffs everywhere, mega-deals worth around $55 billion, and a lot of loud talk about AI. None of that screams stability for teams trying to make the next giant thing.
The big-game gamble is getting riskier
Brevik told PCGamesN that the business of making huge, expensive titles is, in his words, super risky. He pointed to the last two years as especially brutal, with a wave of canceled projects hitting both triple-A and double-A studios. Translation: even well-funded teams with recognizable IPs aren’t safe right now.
Diablo 4 looks steady, but the pressure is still real
Interestingly, Diablo 4 itself isn’t exactly on life support. It’s doing fine by the numbers while still getting pot-shots from all sides. Meeting sky-high player expectations is the real fight, and Brevik says that’s where things get suffocating on a monster franchise like this.
- SteamDB showed 36,116 concurrent Diablo 4 players at the time referenced, compared to an all-time peak of 55,561.
- Blizzard is planning the next major Diablo 4 expansion for 2026.
- Some Season 10 tweaks are going to stick permanently, including the removal of boss invulnerability phases.
The expectations tax on live-service giants
This is the inside baseball part that doesn’t always show up in the marketing: when a game gets massive, every tweak sets off some segment of the audience. Brevik says that makes it stressful to do basically anything, because the expectation bar never stops rising. The only real way through it is to believe in the direction you’ve set and keep going.
"You have to put that aside and say, 'Hey, I believe in the direction we're going here. I believe in what we're doing'."
So yeah, Diablo 4 looks healthy on paper, and Blizzard is making some player-friendly changes (goodbye, boss immunity phases). But zoom out, and Brevik’s point lands: in a market hit by cancellations, giant buyouts, and the latest tech buzzword chasing budgets, building the next big thing has never felt more like walking a tightrope.