Five Reasons Why Diablo III Will Be Announced

1UP is offering a list of five reasons why they think a Diablo III announcement during Blizzard's Worldwide Invitation is inevitable.
Look, there are two certainties in life -- Macho Man Randy Savage is the baddest dude on the planet, and corporations will do whatever makes them money. Square Enix will probably remake Final Fantasy VII, George Lucas will probably make another proper Star Wars movie (and we don't mean this Clone Wars crap), and Blizzard will make Diablo III.

In fact, they kind of already did -- we have it on good authority that Diablo-creator Blizzard North was working on Diablo III back in 2005, before the studio was dissolved in August of that year, and the game was scrapped. And as recently as 2006, Blizzard was still hinting at wanting to continue the Diablo franchise, when COO Paul Sams said in an interview, "StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time. As you probably already know, there is no doubt that we will continue the StarCraft and Diablo franchise, and trust me, I will be the happiest person in the world when we announce StarCraft 2." If we at least know Blizzard wanted to make Diablo III at one point, why would anything have changed since then?

And really, barring a Diablo III announcement, what else would Blizzard make? World of Warcraft is a self-perpetuating machine (with a brand new expansion incoming), Starcraft II is on its way sometime this year, and unless Blizzard is planning to announce The Lost Vikings 3: Vegas Stakes, that only leaves Diablo as the last (recently) untapped major franchise from the star developer. A recently untapped franchise that, when tapped again, will probably earn Blizzard another nonillion damn dollars.

To cut to the chase: If there isn't a Diablo III announcement by the end of this week, we'll eat our hats. (Please don't hold us to that, though.)