Why diablo immortal fails?8/25/2023 ![]() Holding it to the standards of monetization that is acceptable in paid PC or console games (or hell, even free-to-play ones) was always going to be unfair. This is a free-to-play game, after all, made primarily for mobile audiences, and those facts made it abundantly clear that there was going to be some aggressive monetization in here. A lot of what is going on here was, to be honest, very much expected. Much of the game’s monetization is hardly even surprising. And that’s not because the game itself is bad- no, it’s because the business practices of Blizzard and the poorly thought-out monetization of Diablo Immortal have overshadowed the game’s undeniable strengths. Right now, however, barely days after the game’s launch, all of that positivity seems like a distant, half-forgotten thing. ![]() People were playing it and thoroughly enjoying it- the consensus was that it felt like Diablo 3.5, which is far more than what many had expected from a mobile game. ![]() Recently, Diablo Immortal launched in full on mobile devices and as a beta on PC (funnily enough, given the whole backlash against the game not being on PC back when it was first announced), and sure enough, that positive clout the game had accumulated over time was bleeding into launch as well. It looked like Diablo Immortal was going to be a proper, full-fledged Diablo action RPG, an addictive game with surprising polish and production value that would bring over all the mechanical strength that its PC counterparts had always been known for. All of its showings and impressions from those who went hands-on with its suggested that this was no typical free-to-play mobile cashgrab. Credit where credit is due, they were actually doing quite a good job. Those years were eventful ones for the company, which is putting it mildly, and not in a good way, but specifically where Diablo Immortal was concerned, slowly but surely, things were beginning to look up.įor about a year or two in the lead-up to Diablo Immortal’s eventual launch, Blizzard actually worked quite hard to turn people around on the game. Diablo Immortal receded into the background and Blizzard, along with co-developer NetEase, continued working on the game for the next several years. That initial backlash gave way to indifference and apathy over the next couple of years. “Do you guys not have phones?” the developer infamously said, which, of course, was just perfectly emblematic of how out of touch Blizzard was (and continues to be) with its fanbase. Infamously, the company completely misread the context leading up to the game’s announcement, decided to hype people up for a new Diablo reveal, followed up on that hype with the reveal of a free-to-play mobile game, and then had the audacity to act surprised when people were disappointed. Announced first back in 2018, the free-to-play action RPG was the instant recipient of some of the worst and most vicious backlash in Blizzard history. Delays, poor decisions, disappointing releases, and yes, once again, a healthy amount of backlash- all of that is still found in abundance when you look at Blizzard’s recent history.ĭiablo Immortal is a huge part of that recent history. But even if we’re looking purely at Blizzard Entertainment’s operations as a developer and publisher of video games just for the purposes of this feature, the picture that gets painted is still an ugly one. Things have happened outside the realms of their games – major, massive things – that have been nothing short of an indictment of the culture of Activision Blizzard as a whole, and the company and the people in charge there have been on the receiving end of some extremely justified criticism as a result, to say the very least. It’s been a tough few years for Blizzard, for so many reasons.
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