Few Blizzard announcements divided the public as much as Diablo Immortal. Revealed at BlizzCon 2018 as a Diablo for phones, the game was met with boos from part of the audience, who were expecting PC news. When someone asked about a computer version, director Wyatt Cheng replied with the line that became a meme: “Do you guys not have phones?”
Days later, in an interview with VG247, Cheng confirmed one more detail that weighed on the conversation: the game would require a constant internet connection. Even though there are dungeons to play solo, according to him, the game would not allow offline play. What stands out is that the choice made sense given the project’s design: Diablo Immortal was conceived as an action RPG with many areas shared with other players, closer to an MMO than to the classic Diablo games.
Development was a partnership between Blizzard and NetEase, its longtime partner in the Chinese market, for Android and iOS. At the time, it was still unknown how the game would be monetized.
What came next
The launch took a while: Diablo Immortal came out on June 2, 2022, for Android and iOS and, on the same day, in open beta on Windows PC, precisely the platform the audience had asked for. It reached the Asia-Pacific region on July 8 and China on July 25 that year. A nice detail: critics praised the combat and the visuals, which did impress for a mobile game.
The monetization, however, stole the show. Calculations published in the press indicated that around 100 thousand dollars would be needed to max out a character, and Blizzard did not even launch the game in Belgium and the Netherlands because of local laws on loot boxes. The user score on Metacritic plunged to 0.2, one of the lowest ever recorded on the site. Still, it was a commercial success: more than 10 million downloads in the first week and more than 100 million dollars in revenue in eight weeks.
Source: GamingBolt / VG247.
Max Xavier
SavePoint Team
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