Immortal Devil
Snowstorm
It’s a story as old as time. A game is launched with some kind of problem, be it errors or missing functions or monetization controversies. There are a lot of screams on the internet and the company publishes a statement “We’re listening, we promise to do well” and back off some things.
Not so with Diablo Immortal, at least not yet.
Despite becoming a meme for the third or fourth time with the revelation that it can cost $ 110,000 (or more?) To fully equip a character in Diablo Immortal using the game’s loot box-based gem system, the answer Blizzard has been mostly … silence, and now, celebration.
After not tweeting for nearly a week and defending some of the decisions as “not selling equipment” (because jewelry is not “equipment”), game director Wyatt Cheng has now tweeted a Kotaku article called “Diablo Immortal is Far Too Good to Be “. Free ”in which its authors regret the pay-to-win controversy. And he retweeted a message celebrating Immortal’s official account of its 10 million recent installations, the “biggest release in franchise history.”
Virtually every response to these tweets has something to do with the game’s microtransactions, but there have been no more defenses from Cheng, or the team in general, from what I can see. And that’s the question I asked before, which was not just whether Diablo Immortal could be “fixed,” but whether Blizzard would want to fix the game, and much of that depends on how much money this current setup generates. .
Diablo Immortal has been the most downloaded game in many countries in the world on both iOS and the Google Play Store. And of course, Blizzard looks at the game’s performance, especially in a region, Asia, where pay-per-view mobile games are more standardized and a site that also contains extremely avid Diablo fans. The whole concept of the game was to combine these two ideas, and here we are.
But you have to ask yourself, even if Blizzard is accumulating microtransaction cash, which is costing them in the long run. I know I now have some pretty serious concerns about Diablo 4 and how I might choose to monetize myself, even if it doesn’t completely follow the path of the Immortal. And this is Blizzard’s first new game since the 2016 Overwatch, where during that time its reputation has been severely damaged, first by slow support for almost all of its titles, then by the mistreatment of his maids which caused massive outbursts and some horrible ones. revelations. Diablo Immortal does them no favors in the public relations department, and the same goes for their silence / defense of the issues raised after the release.
Right now, Blizzard seems content to weather the storm. And I mean, that could be very profitable, because maybe players can’t resist the siren song of falling gems and pouring a lot of money into the game. So nothing changes, for now.
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