"If there's one thing I love," says Hollywood actor Megan Fox, "it's the sight of blood." Hold on a second, what channel is this?
Yes, Blizzard has paid a large sum of money for what is in effect a high-profile Cameo, whereby some nerd's unremarkable demise in Diablo 4 will be air quotes immortalised by Megan Fox in an extremely skimpy outfit. If you think that games have suddenly gone back to 1980s style marketing stunts, yuh huh!
#DiabloIV is here, embrace the bloodshed.Share videos of your in-game death on Twitter or TikTok using #DiabloDeaths for a chance to have your eulogy read by @meganfox on June 8th. pic.twitter.com/dSgG2yuNbSJune 6, 2023
In Blizzard's advert Fox goes on to unconvincingly detail how much she loves blood and guts. "In Diablo 4 there are rivers of [blood]... show me your worst in-game death with hashtag Diablo Deaths, and you might get a eulogy from yours truly telling the world you went out like a hero… or a chump."
I guess the funniest thing about this is that dying in Diablo is nothing special. This isn't like Dead Space or the Callisto Protocol, where failure sees your poor avatar visibly ripped-apart in pretty awful ways. In Diablo your avatar just kinda… keels over and the 'you're dead' screen appears? It happens so fast I'm not even sure I can describe the death animation before you become a ghost. If there's one word I wouldn't associate with a Diablo game over anyway, it's hero.
Nevertheless, here we are in the year of our lord 2023. Amusingly enough I went to Megan Fox's twitter profile to see if she'd commented on the Diablo social post, and she hasn't tweeted since this in 2013: "5 days on Twitter and I have yet to discern its purpose. #WhatIsThePoint???"
The point is clearly to have Ms. Fox breathily intoning about what a good boy someone is as he miscalculates the incoming DPS and gets shanked by the Butcher. I'm sure it works for some. And having now looked at some of the quote tweets, which I will not reproduce, it clearly does.
Oh well. In terms of actual Diablo 4 news, the game's got off to a pretty stonking start with only minimal server issues, with players already discovering some very neat stuff, though the microtransactions leave a lot to be desired in a premium priced title. As for this, well, let me pose a question and then answer it. How huge is Blizzard's marketing budget for Diablo 4? Yes.
