Diablo is donating 6.66 million maggots and counting to a wildlife sanctuary in honour of Duriel the Maggot King
Blizzard is rounding up all the maggots it can find and shipping them off to Tiddywinkles UK, a specialist wildlife hospital, this Earth Day. The number of maggots sent off depends on how many likes one tweet gets.
Well, specifically, the person rounding up all the grubs is actually Diablo 4's Duriel the Maggot King, which is pretty apposite, honestly: "Duriel the Maggot King has enlisted you to help sacrifice his horde," Diablo's official Twitter account explains in a tweet. "For every 25 likes on this post, we will donate 45,000 maggots to birds undergoing treatment and rehabilitation at @TiggywinklesUK. Send millions of maggots to meat their maker."
The goal is to reach two years' worth of food for the animals at Tiggywinkles UK, and the maggots can be stored away so none of them will go to waste. The hospital is open 24/7 all year round, taking care of all sorts of injured and orphaned British wildlife like hedgehogs and small birds—there are even a couple of European Eagle Owls called Emily and James at the site right now, so the maggots have plenty of customers lining up. In the 40 years that Tiggywinkles has been open, it has cared for over 300,000 patients, so two years' worth of food sounds like it will go to great use.
It's also not a cheap task. 45,000 maggots roughly works out to 12 pints, which costs around £38 to £74 depending on where you source your grubs. This means that at the low end, it could cost Blizzard £1.52 per like, which totals around £7,600 and counting so far. But as the Maggot King, Duriel hopefully gets a better deal than that—he probably has a lot lying around. And as the official Diablo account eloquently tweeted, "Can you put a price on the joy of eating maggots!?" Probably not.
We tend to see a few environmental efforts as sustainability week and Earth Day roll around, and while Blizzard could have just donated two years' worth of maggots off the back of Diablo 4's success, it's still a nice gesture and fun challenge for people to get stuck into. As long as the birds get their maggots, all's well that ends well.