Blizzard won’t confirm or deny whether Diablo 3 is coming out for Nintendo Switch

Okay. This one gets intricate.

Mitch recently mentioned a Diablo tweet that seemed to be hinting towards the idea of Diablo 3 appearing on the Nintendo Switch. Now, the game is already on Xbox One and PS4 as well as the Xbox 360 and PS3, so it’s hard to say that the Switch couldn’t run it. But Blizzard has denied it — or at least said they have nothing to announce. Then again, if we look at the wording of their denial, it starts to look less like a denial and more like a clever way to not deny it.

Polygon spoke to Blizzard, and was told:

We can assure you we’re not that clever…[It was] meant to be a fun community engagement piece. We have nothing to announce.

Note that what the statement doesn’t include is a firm no. It says Blizzard isn’t that clever. It says it was a fun community engagement piece. It says they have nothing to announce. But it doesn’t say they’re not working on it. And that may be important, because the folks at Eurogamer are pretty sure that Blizzard is working on it.

The Eurogamer piece credits sources without naming any, which isn’t surprising, but it makes any confirmation difficult at best. Right now, we have an ambiguously worded statement from Blizzard that doesn’t actually deny the existence of the port but hardly confirms it, and a lot of speculation based on the teaser tweet — and now fueled by Eurogamer and other sites.

So is Blizzard releasing Diablo 3 for the Switch? And if they are, why would they post a teaser image and then immediately backtrack? Why not just say “no comment” instead of “we’re not that clever” which is an interesting way to go about it, if you think about it. What’s going on here?

Eurogamer speculated in their piece that Nintendo isn’t fond of teasers or announcements too far ahead of the actual release date of a game, but that’s an unknown as well. Right now, we know very little, save that quite a few sites seem willing to accept Eurogamer’s word on this one.

At any rate, either there isn’t a Switch port and we’ll fine out when it never materializes, or there is and that’s why Blizzard didn’t actually deny it in their statement. I know I’m more curious than ever — with Diablo 3 currently on all the major consoles save for the Switch, and the Switch seeing ports of games like Skyrim and Doom, it feels like a no brainer for Diablo 3 to make the leap. All we can do now is wait and see.