Diablo Immortal is exactly what fans feared
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Diablo Immortal has been out in the wild for a few weeks now, and in that time, the verdict has become clear – aside from being heavily monetized, Diablo Immortal is unquestionably winning.
Before launch, fans knew that Diablo Immortal would have microtransactions. After all, the game is free without any story content or major features locked behind a paywall. Blizzard needs to make money on Diablo Immortal somehow, but it’s unclear to what extent the studio will monetize what it claims is the most “ambitious” Diablo game to date. Fans think it will include premium currency, paid cosmetics, and a battle pass, and it includes all of that and more. It’s not quite clear, what Blizzard didn’t reveal, is how much money plays when it comes to boosting your role in Diablo Immortal endgame, and the advantage that doing so gives you over other players is.
At the heart of the problem are Legendary Crests and Legendary Gems. You see, not all legendary gems are the same – some are very rare and powerful. These 5-star Legendary Gems are miles above the 1- or 2-star Legendary Gems, offering more powerful effects, but also higher stats in the form of more resonance, which can increase an item’s health and damage . As a player, you want as many of these powerful gems as possible, and as many vibes as possible. You also want to upgrade them as many times as possible to further increase their power. Gems are upgraded by salvaging unneeded legendary gems, and higher-level gems require not only the remaining unneeded gem shards, but also dozens of gems of the same type to level up.
The problem is, these coveted and extremely powerful gems are only available through Legendary Emblem. These badges are a premium item that can be purchased for real money and are guaranteed to drop some kind of Legendary Gem when used in conjunction with the game’s Ancient Rift. The Legendary Crest also includes a small chance of approximately 5% to drop a 5-star Legendary Gem.
If you’re a completely free player, or even one who just bought the Battle Pass and a few one-off packs, you’ll only have a few Legendary Emblems when you reach the endgame. To earn more, you need to spend more. Instead, free-to-play players will only be able to use Rare Emblem, which doesn’t include any chance of a 5-star Legendary Gem, and isn’t even guaranteed to get any type of Legendary Gem after completing an Ancient Rift. Given how many more Legendary Gems are required to level up, players who don’t use Legendary Emblem may see little progress for weeks or months, as this is one of the key ways to level up a character.
There is no doubt that Diablo Immortal’s legendary gem system is winning.
The problem here is clear. People who spend money on dozens of Legendary Emblems will not only have more Legendary Gems than players who only buy the Battle Pass, but also more of the most powerful 5-star gems in the game. Quite simply, free players will never be as powerful as those willing to spend hundreds of dollars. While there are technically ways free-to-play players can get 5-star Legendary Gems without spending money to craft them, it’s so time-consuming, resource-intensive, and luck-based that you might not even try.
Players who spend money will be much stronger than players who don’t. It would be one thing if this only applied to the PvE parts of Diablo Immortal, such as Dungeons, Raids, and Challenge Rift Leaderboards. However, it also applies to PvP, which is a major focus of Diablo Immortal, with its new conflict looping system pitting two player factions against each other, and including PvP battlefields. While the game’s combat rating stats are capped in PvP to ensure a more level playing field, the powerful Legendary gem effects and the stat resonance boost provided by gems do not, meaning players are equipped with the best 5-star Legendaries in the game Gems (which, again, can actually only be obtained by spending money) absolutely knock out free-to-play players.
These types of pay systems aren’t entirely new to many mobile or free-to-play role-playing games. For example, Genshin Impact is one of the most popular free-to-play games in the world. It relies heavily on a glorified slot machine system (aka the gacha system) where players spend real money to have access to rare characters and weapons that are far superior to those available to free players. Lost Ark, like Diablo, is a free-to-play ARPG MMO that lets players buy materials for gear upgrades directly from its in-game store. However, the difference between these two examples and Diablo Immortal is that Genshin Impact is only available for PvE, while Lost Ark balances its PvP so that the stats are evened out to ensure a level and playing field.
If you ignore the PvP elements, it’s sad that Diablo Immortal isn’t an outlier in the popular free-to-play RPG, and it doesn’t do anything that dozens of cash-out mobile games haven’t done before. These types of microtransactions aren’t even the first in the Diablo franchise. When Diablo III was released in 2012, it included a real-money auction house where players could sell in-game items for cash, with Blizzard taking a small cut of each transaction. As players reach higher difficulties and progress slowly, many feel compelled to engage with the auction house to improve their characters. Blizzard listened to the feedback and finally removed the auction house from Diablo III entirely, seemingly having learned its lesson.
To see the same scene again in Diablo Immortal – which also includes an auction house where players can sell items such as legendary gems to each other for a special currency that can be bought for real money in another – Blizzard not only failed to learn from the team’s past mistakes, but seemed bent on repeating them. Diablo as a series is all about slaying countless demons, gaining more powerful loot, and progressing your character to meet ever-growing challenges. Being able to simply buy a path to success, whether through Legendary Emblem or the game’s auction house, undermines the very essence of Diablo as a franchise.
There are several ways that Diablo Immortal is not monetized.
When Diablo Immortal was first announced to be mobile-only at BlizzCon 2018, it was met with widespread backlash from fans, who asked if the game’s reveal was an outdated April Fool’s joke, and if the game would also appear in on the PC. Blizzard responded as if players were the ones who lost touch, asking “Don’t you have a cell phone?” Although part of the disastrous announcement of Diablo Immortal was due to Blizzard’s hardcore PC-centric fans wanting to see Diablo Immortal Gods IV instead of getting something entirely different, but the negative reaction also stemmed from the rightful reputation of free mobile games rife with predatory. Microtransactions. The idea of a highly monetized, pay-to-win Diablo game sounds like the antithesis of everything Blizzard stands for.
Over time, Blizzard finally announced that Diablo was also coming to PC, and some longtime fans of Diablo and Blizzard, myself included, dared to hope that Blizzard would use Diablo to counter the mobile gaming trend, while Is to provide a beautiful, freemium game fans. Franchises would be proud, and some of that has passed. Diablo Immortal is undeniably interesting. It controls well on mobile devices and packs some top-notch production value, especially for a free-to-play mobile game. It’s entirely possible for casual players to get through and enjoy the game’s main story without spending any money. But as any fan knows, Diablo basically starts after the main story is done, and Blizzard is taking advantage of that for Diablo Immortal.
The real disappointment with Diablo Immortal isn’t that it includes so many microtransactions, or even that it’s pay-to-win. It comes from the sad reality that instead of using Diablo’s mobile debut to push the mobile RPG scene forward, as Blizzard has done across numerous genres over the years, it chose to embrace the platform’s worst practices. Diablo Immortal’s pay-to-win mechanics encourage players to spend hundreds of dollars (or over $80,000, according to one player’s estimate) to maximize their characters with Legendary Gems. Premium item bundles in the game can be as low as $1 and include an 800% “value” percentage to attract players. Then as the player progresses and more bundles are unlocked, the price of the bundles starts to increase. Three separate paid services are offered, giving players willing to spend their money an edge over those who think they can play with just buying a simple battle pass. There’s even a full endgame progression system that revolves around opening increasingly expensive loot chests with keys that can also be opened with special currency purchased with paid currency. The list goes on. When you have players spam in-game chat hoping to form groups exclusively with other pay-to-win “whales” (a term for players who spend a lot of money in free games compared to regular players), there is a serious problem.
There are plenty of potential money-making opportunities in the free-to-play mobile game market, and there’s no denying that Blizzard’s strategy seems to be working. Diablo Immortal reportedly grossed more than $24 million in its first two weeks as the game was banned in two European countries and has yet to be released in China (the game’s China release was recently delayed until July). 7 days). People seem to be more willing to spend thousands of dollars on Diablo Immortal, if only to point out how bad an idea is. A popular streamer paid about $16,000 for one of Diablo’s coveted 5-star Legendary gems, only to tear it down immediately, delete his character, and then uninstall the game in protest.
Spending thousands of dollars in Diablo Immortal just to make a point (as many streamers do) may seem hypocritical, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot of disposable income among these streamers that can go to waste. They can throw thousands of dollars into a game like Diablo to grab the audience’s attention and then delete their characters when they get bored. The reality is that most players can spend a few bucks in Diablo, play for a while, and get on with their lives. But for the few players with gambling and addiction issues who find themselves mired in predatory systems and microtransactions like in Diablo Immortal, that luxury doesn’t exist. Players who can’t afford to put hundreds or thousands of dollars down the drain, but feel compelled — and in many ways compelled to do so — are hurting them the most by these types of mobile gaming practices anyway, with Diablo God of Destruction Immortality is a textbook example. Diablo Immortal appears to be a financial success, and the fact that players spend a lot of money in it doesn’t change the fact that the game’s monetization model is predatory. In fact, Diablo’s immortal financial success is further evidence of this.
Will the monetization of Diablo Immortal change over time? Of course, they might take into account the state of the high pay-to-win PvP scene in the game and the overall negative perception of the public. Many longtime Blizzard players and Diablo fans, to put it bluntly, aren’t happy with the state of Diablo’s immortality. But Blizzard is years old and has a fresh memory of the failure of Diablo III…
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