Gears of War's very own Rod Fergusson is leaving the franchise and moving to Blizzard. This was revealed by none other than Fergusson himself on his official Twitter account. He is moving to Blizzard and is going to oversee the Diablo series.
This is the second announcement involving a top-level executive in a game company. Rockstar Games Co-Founder and Vice-President of Creative Dan Houser is also leaving his company. You can read about that here.
Back to Fergusson, he started his career at Microsoft working on Microsoft Train Simulator. By 2005 he moved to Epic Games and was the executive producer for Gears of War, becoming part of development for the whole series. In a tweet, Fergusson said that working with Gears of War "has been the joy of my life", but it was now "time for a new adventure." The franchise is now safe in the hands of The Coalition.
According to The Verge, while this is sad for Gears of War fans, Fergusson's success with the franchise could be good news for Diablo fans. The franchise has been on a rollercoaster lately. When Diablo: Immortal was revealed during BlizzCon 2018, it didn't met the reaction Blizzard wanted. It didn't help that Blizzard started deleting comments on the Diablo: Immortal trailer on YouTube. While Diablo IV was announced at BlizzCon 2019, there was no release date given.
This is pretty much what the industry and community are thinking. Screen Rant in a report said that one of the reasons why Fergusson is good for Diablo is because he has been known to be a "closer." Back in 2012, for instance, Fergusson became part of Irrational Games during the last stretch of the development of BioShock Infinite. It was that particular involvement that ensured BioShock Infinite was able to meet its potential despite a delay in development and the fact that the BioShock team was experiencing a lot of departures.
