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Blizzard expected a little pushback, but the announcement of Diablo Immortal turned into an unmitigated disaster as fans raged over the notion that it was neglecting a core part of its audience. They wanted Diablo 4 on PC and instead Blizzard was giving them a spin-off mobile game.
That's when players stumbled across playdiablo4.com, saw that it redirected to POE currency trade Pathofexile.com, and thought it must be in response to Diablo Immortal. The joke quickly spread when the media got a hold of it, and Zein's little gag became the poster child of protest against Blizzard.
Yesterday, though, Zein received an email from "some guy who used Diablo fan forums" offering to buy the domain. "I entertained his email with an 'I might' response," Zein told me. But, apparently, that was just all just a ruse. Shortly after, Zein received an email from Blizzard's lawyers informing him that he was infringing upon their copyright and committing an act of cybersquatting—buying website domains containing someone else's trademark in the attempt to profit from them. It would seem that, by offering to sell the domain to this unknown buyer, Zein proved his intent to profit from Diablo's trademark.
"They asked to take down the pathofexile.com redirect and tried to get me to Path of exile currency transfer the domain over to Blizzard," Zein wrote in a post to the Path of Exile subreddit explaining the situation. "Because they couldn’t see a reason I’d keep the domain except for commercial purposes."
Naturally, this has only stoked the flames of outrage. The post quickly blew up and reached the front page of Reddit, where the thread filled with comments like "Blizzard is freaking salty" and "tell them to get fucked." For many, this looked like Blizzard desperately trying to do damage control and silence criticism.
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