Blizzard's Diablo Immortal was designed with the China market in mind after the company saw an opportunity for high-quality mobile games in the country, according to a number of sources.

Word comes by way of a Kotaku report into Blizzard and the Diablo franchise, with developers telling the outlet that the title is being made because consumers in this region will buy it.

One employee pointed to gamers in this part of the world having a rather low bar for quality, meaning that a firm like Blizzard - known for its polish - could do rather well.

Sources told the outlet that the original plan for the game was to launch it in China first.

“Essentially it exists because we’ve heard that China really wants it,” said one developer. “It is really for China."

Another dev added: "The quality bar in the Chinese market, especially for framerate, is extremely low. You can release something that’d be considered alpha footage here and it’d be a finished game there.”

Blizzard denial

In a statement, Blizzard refuted this narrative, saying that the game was designed with a worldwide audience in mind.

“One of our core values is ‘think globally’ and our history has shown that we strive to make our games in as many languages as possible so more players can enjoy them,” the firm said.

“With that in mind, we quickly knew that we wanted to bring Diablo Immortal to the global audience.”

Our sister-site PCGamesInsider.biz has the full story.