The ASUS ROG Phone and/or Diablo Immortal Beta’s Canada regional testing rumors are now officially debunked.

Gustav_ASUS responded the following: “Users who subscribe to common topics like ‘ROG Phone 3’ and ‘Gaming news’ on ROG Connect got the notification.”

Furthermore, Gustav_ASUS also stated that the notification was not sent “only to canadians” nor was it an advertisement sponsored or in partnership with Blizzard Entertainment. The notification he wrote was a regular content post to generate hype for an upcoming game that the ASUS ROG Phone community has been discussing.

ORIGINAL POST BELOW:

For now I will responsibly tag this as a “Rumor.” A Diablo Immortal Reddit Discord channel member, known as FalconX99, shared with other members a couple of images of an app notification.

These are the details surrounding this:

  • FalconX99 owns an ASUS ROG phone.
  • The notification came from his ASUS Armoury Crate app — a pre-installed app in ASUS ROG phones.
  • FalconX99 resides in Canada.

The ASUS community manager Gustav_ASUS pushing a notification through the ASUS Armoury Crate app about Diablo Immortal is an advertising campaign.

I don’t know if it is a custom to promote games for free, but being around in the Blizzard community for 19 years… this requires some kind of legal binding partnership between ASUS and Blizzard Entertainment to “push” ads.

FalconX99 shared this video with me where the app notification pushed the Diablo Immortal ads.

You don’t ask a phone manufacturer to push ads about a game that has no beta date or release date — and neither ask them to push these ads for free. So this is a big deal. Something is coming.

Of course, there are a few if’s and a pinch of assumption here — but from what I can read in between the lines is that Blizzard and ASUS might have partnered to push Diablo Immortal ads to ASUS ROG phone users who live in Canada — inviting them to pre-register to participate in the Diablo Immortal Beta.

After all, Blizzard and ASUS have been partners for a few years. You can see ASUS listed as a BlizzCon sponsor in this BlizzCon 2017 blog — sporting the ROG logo (ROG stands for the Republic of Gamers brand).

Right now, today, November 23 is the Day 91 since the Diablo Immortal Internal Testing began.

If we are to use Blizzard’s 76-100 days development cycle between Alpha and Beta from past World of Warcraft expansions and some of their other games — this rumor gives an extra oomph to the Diablo Immortal Beta hype.

In a past article, I discussed how mobile games beta tests work different than PC games. This is something I learned from MrMesli — a game developer who visits the discord channel.

Regional Tests are performed often in secondary mobile markets: India, Singapore, Vietnam, New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Brazil… and Canada. To name a few.

The latest Activision Blizzard Q3 investors call once more mentioned: “Diablo Immortal will soon enter external regional testing.”

This ASUS push notification to a canadian player might be the first crumb that Canada might be the region chosen for the first Diablo Immortal regional testing; or one of various regional tests. But for now, it’s a rumor.

Call of Duty: Mobile started Closed Beta (1) in India — May 16, 2019. Closed Beta (2) in Australia in June 10, 2019. iOS Closed Beta in Australia in June 14, 2019. Soft Launch in Canada and Australia by July 18, 219. Soft Launch (2) in Peru, then Closed Beta (3) in some Southeast Asia countries. Closed Beta (4) in Korea by September 25, 2019. The point is… there might be multiple regional tests weeks or months apart from each other.

Until I can confirm if other canadian, other non-canadian, and other ASUS ROG phone users also got this notification, it will remain a rumor. Follow @blizzplanetcom for updates. I am on the hunt to find confirmation.

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