Announcement of Diablo Immortal

Dear Cheng, have you forgotten that you're at a mainstream gaming convention and not at Google I/O or an Apple Conference?

The Blizzcon 2018 took place between November 2-3, 2018 at the Anaheim Convention Centre in Anaheim, California. While the whole ceremony was reportedly met with middling reactions, one particular part of the show was met with severe backlash that Blizzard was not prepared for; that being their announcement of the next entry in the Diablo franchise, Diablo Immortal.

Before BlizzCon

On October 17, 2018, Blizzard published an article on their official blog stating their plans for Diablo at BlizzCon. The article stated: "We know what many of you are hoping for and we can only say that “good things come to those who wait,” but evil things often take longer. We appreciate your patience as our teams work tirelessly to create nightmarish experiences worthy of the Lord of Terror.", along with giving some publicity for the Nintendo Switch version of Diablo III, which was due to release the day BlizzCon began.

The Announcement

Fans of the series have waiting for a new entry since Diablo III was released back in 2012 to initially lukewarm reviews. The crowd became hyped when Wyatt Cheng took to the stage to make the announcement about either Diablo IV or a remaster of a previous installment. However, hopes were quickly dashed when Cheng mentioned mobile phones, at which point everyone realized that this would be a mobile spin-off game, rather than a full-fledged dungeon crawler on the PC and possibly consoles. It also didn't help that game was being developed in partnership with Chinese studio NetEase, who are pretty infamous for making tons of mobile games that use the same gameplay template that, funnily enough, look like Diablo knockoffs. The real kicker though, was that this announcement was made right at the very end of the ceremony and was set up as the big highlight. To say the gaming community was not happy about this is a massive understatement.

Reactions

Reactions from the audience were initially apathetic, but the larger community reacted extremely negatively to the announcement that a beloved franchise was being cheapened into a mobile spin-off. During the Q&A portion of the presentation, two individuals stood out; the first person (who was later revealed to be a small YouTuber named Dontinquire) calmly asked if the announcement was some "out-of-season April Fool's joke", which instantly became a meme, and the second (Lord Fluffy) asked if the game would be on PC. When Cheng confirmed that there are no plans to bring Diablo Immortal to PC, the audience practically jeered the house down. The cinematic and gameplay trailers were also heavily disliked: at the time of this page's creation, the cinematic trailer had 13,943 likes versus 415,293 dislikes, while the gameplay trailer had 9,507 likes versus 192,739 dislikes.

YongYea made a video giving his two cents on the matter, comparing the whole fiasco to Electronic Arts' similar butchering of Command & Conquer with their new mobile game, Command & Conquer: Rivals. Another user, Puertorock77, stated in his video that these big gaming events are no place for mobile games, since the main audiences for them (hardcore gamers) don't care about mobile games (even though mobile games are not presented at gaming conventions that much). He even pointed out that while Microsoft announced a Gears of War mobile game at E3 2018, it didn't matter, since everyone was talking about all the other games they showed off, plus at least they didn't treat this mobile game as a big upcoming release as Activision Blizzard did with Diablo Immortal.

Response from Blizzard

After the announcement was made, Blizzard went into full-on damage control mode, deleting some of the less favorable comments from both of the announcement trailers on YouTube and even unlisting a previous upload of one of the trailers and putting it back up just to reset the likes/dislikes. During the Q&A portion of Blizzcon 2018, they responded quite defensively to the audience after they booed the confirmation of "no PC release" with a knee-jerk reaction of "do you guys not have mobile phones?!?!" Wyatt Cheng also stated that he "[doesn't] think that the word "mobile" should be seen as a dirty word", failing to realise that mobile games already carry a negative stigma due to how easy it is to implement predatory monetization mechanics into them, with games like Dungeon Keeper Mobile being perfect examples of that sentiment. His statement also drew parallels with a similar comment that EA's Patrick Soderlund made about Command & Conquer: Rivals, where he said that "we need to respect mobile games as much as we respect console games". The amount of backlash Activision Blizzard faced was unprecedented; not even Konami faced this kind of backlash over Metal Gear Survive when it was first announced.

Blizzard planned to tease Diablo IV with a short video, but this was pulled at the last minute. According to people familiar with Blizzard's inner workings, the game has gone through a troubled development cycle, going through at least two completely different iterations over the last four years. Blizzard later clarified that, while a teaser video was made, it was not planned for BlizzCon. However, they did claim that they are working on several unnanounced Diablo projects, waiting for the right time to make an announcement.

Activision Blizzard ended up losing $3.7 billion in stock as a result of the announcement. Due to overwhelmingly negatively reception, development of Diablo Immortal was de-prioritized and heavily delayed. The game would eventually launch an open beta for limited countries in late 2021 and was fully released on Android, iOS, and PC on June 2, 2022.

Release

Diablo Immortal received mixed reviews from critics, with a 67 (PC) and 59 (iOS) on Metacritic. However, audiences and internet reviewers review bombed the game, with a 0.4/10 (iOS) and 0.3/10 (PC) on Metacritic because of its heavy microtransactions and hidden mechanics. Bellular News estimated that it would take $110,000 to fully upgrade a character. On June 26, 2022, one Reddit user revealed that it would actually cost $540,000 to fully upgrade a character.^[1]

Twitch streamer Quin69 spent over NZ$25,000 (US$15,000) on the game before he earned his first five-star legendary gem, after which he deleted his account.^[2] The five-star drop rate is 1 in 2000, at $25 per loot box containing ten gems.^[3] There was also a simulator website that shows how many times you spent ($25) to get a five-star legendary gem^[4]^[5].

The PC version is currently the lowest user-rated game of all time on Metacritic, tied with Madden NFL 21 for the PlayStation 4.

In its first two weeks, the game was downloaded over 8.5 million times and earned $24 million. 83 percent of the game's revenue came from five countries (the USA, South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Canada) while 60 percent of all downloads came from the USA, South Korea, Brazil, Japan, and Germany.^[6] In its first month, the game had 10 million downloads and earned Blizzard $49 million.

Diablo Immortal's Chinese release was delayed to July 25 after the game's Weibo account was banned for comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie-the-Pooh. This caused NetEase's stock to drop by 7 percent.^[7]

On September 2, 2022, several "whales" found themselves in massive in-game "debt" after their purchases from third-party websites were revoked. One player posted a negative 2.5 million balance in orbs, which would cost $35,000.^[8]