As Diablo 4 struggles to find its feet despite stellar launch reviews and an equally brilliant expansion, former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to explain how he'd fix the game's issues. With the ARPG's next expansion pushed into next year despite initial promises of annual DLCs, alongside a somewhat lukewarm response to its seasonal model, Diablo 4 isn't doing as well as Blizzard might have hoped. As competitors like Path of Exile 2 and Last Epoch continue to thrive, Ybarra states that he's "not sure where Diablo is going."
Despite a RPG hasn't quite managed to find its feet. While it peaked at over 55k players on Steam for the launch of the absolutely brilliant Vessel of Hatred DLC, it's struggled to crest 20k since December, with free weeks seeing spikes in player count that unfortunately drop off relatively quickly.
At the time of writing, Diablo 4's 24-hour peak sits at 5,942 players; while the vast majority of its fanbase is probably still playing through Battle.net, the Steam numbers are pretty grim. Ybarra chalks this up to a number of things, including pushing seasons live too early and making balancing changes too late, as well as its focus on big, story-centric DLCs.
"Don't ship to check a box," Ybarra begins. "Seasons need to get off the cycle of shipping, spending two months to fix issues, then repeating. Pause and give the team time to really address the end-game issues. Playing for a week to then one or three shot an 'uber' boss 500 times for a unique, then quitting until next season, is fundamentally not fun."
He also notes that the "expansion schedule is too long," and that it "should be yearly." This was the initial plan when the game launched, but Blizzard has since pushed the game's next expansion into 2026, and backpedaled on its earlier statements. Ybarra claims that this issue could be solved by "reducing 'story' investment (costs so much for [a] one-time element in a ARPG) and focus on new classes, new mob types, new end-game activities that last more than a few days."
In the comments, he also states that Diablo 4 "needs a loot filter that works" – a popular request from the game's community that, despite being popular in competitors like Path of Exile 2, Blizzard has largely shut down.
"If the cycle continues to just ship without fixing the fundamental issues, then I'm not sure where Diablo is going," he continues. "You can add all the end-game activities you want, but you'll be running in place with the same issues. At some point there's just so many random things, it's not worth the effort. If they pause to understand the situation and factors, and they don't fix it, they'll repeat it in Diablo 5."
When asked if he can provide any insight on why the team hasn't made any changes to its model, he simply responds "anyone can say things. Teams have to understand and do them."
With the return of BlizzCon and World of Warcraft's Worldsoul saga trundling on in the background, the future looks bright for Blizzard. Whether Diablo 4 can withstand its current storm remains to be seen, however; hopefully 2026 is a good year.
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