Daily Briefing: Wednesday 4th August

Diablo Immortal pushed to 2022

Activision Blizzard have had a deservedly rocky couple of weeks and, in the middle of it all, had to publish their Q2 financial results. There's obviously quite a bit going on but an almost-hidden titbit is that often-ridiculed Diablo Immortal has slipped to a H1 2022 launch window. A developer update posted to the game's official website reads that, following the feedback provided by Alpha testers, the team have been "tuning core and endgame features" as well as working to provide things like controller support.

• Elsewhere in the presentation pack, it's noted that development on Diablo IV is progressing well and that Blizzard have "allocated substantial resources" to its development. It is also revealed that Overwatch 2 recently passed an important internal development milestone, and that the team are looking forward to sharing more information on the game as it approaches the "later stages" of development in the coming months. In the meantime, will anybody really miss Diablo Immortal?

Blizzard may have just ousted their head of global HR

In other Activision Blizzard news Jesse Meschuk, who was SVP and senior people officer for Blizzard Entertainment and Activision Blizzard, left the company this week. Activision Blizzard haven't commented on his departure beyond confirming that  he "is no longer with the company." Given Bobby Kotick recently (eventually) pledged to start dealing with offenders and it seems very much like Meschuk was booted out the door following harsh allegations against Blizzard's HR departure.

• Contrast the deafening silence of Meschuk's departure with another - Craig Morrison. Morrison was a prominent figure of the World of Warcraft dev team having served as Design Manager across three expansions - Legion, Warlords of Draenor, and Battle for Azeroth. More recently, he was Principal Director on WoW's Shadowlands expansion and The Burning Crusade Classic. He recently confirmed that last week was his final one with Blizzard, but had held off announcing it because "last week didn't seem like the time to make anything about me." His move was in the works for a while and just seems like a standard career change with questionable timing.

Is the PlayStation 5 stock situation finally sorted?

During a recent post-earnings call with investors, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki was asked about how the ongoing, industry-wide semiconductor shortage was affecting PlayStation 5 manufacturing. Totoki responded that Sony have actually secured enough the sought-after chipsets for the PS5 to meet its sales target for the remainder of the fiscal year. Sony want to ship almost 15m PS5 consoles by April 2022 - and now apparently they have enough components to actually build those consoles.

• Something else that came out of Sony's recent earnings call was the revelation that PlayStation Plus subscriber numbers have been dropping for a while and Sony don't seem to be particularly worried. The service had 46.3m subscribers as of the end of July and, while that is an increase of 1.3m over the same reporting period last year, it's actually 1m lower than the previous two reporting quarters. Sony also reported a 10m drop in MAUs compared to the same period last year but contribute both this and the PlayStation Plus subscriber drops to the pandemic engagement boom evening out.