“A lot of people felt stunned by it,” said the person who was there. “I think a lot of them felt like, ‘We made mistakes on Diablo III, but we learned and we made Reaper to show what we could do. We have fixed it, and Reaper’s really good.’ I think a lot of people felt like we’d figured it out and we know how to do this, and expansion two, whatever it would’ve been, would’ve been the highest expression of that… To have them pull the plug without really seeing how Reaper did really stung.”

It’s still not clear why Blizzard wouldn’t want to support a game that had been so commercially successful, but the theory on Team 3 was that Blizzard’s management had lost faith in Diablo III and saw it as a failure, even before Reaper launched. “The perception overall was that management thought, ‘This team really screwed up,’” said one person who was there. “They could’ve held off a few months and seen how Reaper did, but in their mind [Diablo III] was irredeemable.” (When Reaper launched on PC in late March, 2014, Blizzard said it sold 2.7 million copies in its first week—a big number, but only a fraction of the ~15 million copies that Diablo III had sold across PC and consoles.)

When asked, Blizzard did not address the cancellation of this expansion, but as part of a broader statement, spoke about cancellations in general. “As far as game cancellations, we see that as a strength—a reflection of our commitment to quality, and how we’ve always operated,” the spokesperson said. “Historically, we’ve launched about 50% of the total projects we’ve worked on over the past three decades—those are the ones we consider representative of Blizzard quality. Not shipping a game is never an easy decision to make, but it has always been the right decision for us. Cancelling Titan led us to Overwatch, and as another example, cancelling Nomad led us to World of Warcraft.”