Ex-Blizzard President Comments on Diablo 4 Roadmap Backlash

Summary
- Diablo 4 fans have criticized Blizzard’s 2025 content roadmap.
- Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra highlights the developer’s issue with shipping seasons too early.
- Players point out the lack of innovation at Blizzard, disappointed by copy-and-paste seasonal content.
Blizzard Entertainment has been receiving a wave of backlash recently after Diablo 4’s 2025 content roadmap was revealed to the community. The player base found the content disappointing, noting the schedule looked like a copy-and-paste job from past seasons outlining the bare minimum of what to expect. Some Diablo 4 fans went as far as to call the devs a “shadow of their former self,” but there were still plenty of players championing positivity and reminding negative naysayers that the action RPG is still a great game regardless of the half-baked roadmap.
Diablo 4 first launched in 2023 and allows gamers to explore the Sanctuary’s open world with procedurally generated dungeons playing as one of six classes, including Barbarian, Necromancer, and Druid, while Mephisto’s daughter, Lilith, wreaks havoc. Diablo 4’s latest update for March 2025 was smaller in scale but delivered the necessary bug fixes to make gameplay more seamless. A new resolution scaling feature and introductory support for Intel XeLL and XeSS Frame Generation were also added.

Related
Diablo 4 May Want to Take Notes from One Popular Game’s Battle Pass
Diablo 4 may be adopting a more flexible Battle Pass with player-driven reward paths, so getting inspiration from one game could be worthwhile.
Diablo 4’s 2025 content roadmap detailed the upcoming seasons featuring witchcraft powers and new collabs from April, and a new expansion was also announced for 2026. However, due to the backlash, the former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra weighed in on Twitter to share his “personal opinion” with the community. Ybarra was against shipping seasons too early and thought more time should be given for the team to address end-game issues. Noting the expansion schedule as too long was also mentioned, and Ybarra wasn’t “sure where Diablo is going” if the cycle of shipping without fixing “fundamental issues” continued.
Diablo 4’s Former President Mike Ybarra Addresses 2025 Roadmap Controversy
In response to Ybarra’s thoughts, social media users thought these problems stemmed from a lack of innovation at Blizzard, and the former president eluded that the team was too busy fixing past bugs for them to focus on new features, like adding Rankings and leaderboards to the game. Additionally, Diablo 4’s March of the Goblin update had a problematic launch, affecting players in Xbox’s camp when Blizzard delayed its release, which adds to the weight of issues on the developer’s doorstep currently.
On a more positive note, Diablo 4 was nominated at 2025’s BAFTA Games Awards, up for Best Evolving Game alongside Final Fantasy 14, No Man’s Sky, Sea of Thieves, and World of Warcraft. In the end, Vampire Survivors took home the trophy, but the nod was a testament to Blizzard’s ongoing effort to keep Lilith’s flames burning despite the recent controversies. Following The Game Awards 2025’s conclusion, Astro Bot, once again, won the Best Game title, beating Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong to the punch.

Diablo 4
- Released
-
June 6, 2023
- ESRB
-
M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
- Engine
-
Proprietary Engine