Diablo Immortal has taken heavy criticism after launch and has been bombarded with lousy reviews. However, the game is doing very well financially and with the delayed launch in China, it has increased its player base by a third.
This is the state of Diablo Immortal: Since its launch on June 2, Blizzard’s new game has had to contend with a wave of negative reactions and review bombing from fans. The cash store and the monetization of Diablo Immortal, which is heavily Pay2Win especially in the endgame and resorts to psychological tricks to pull money out of the players’ pockets, have been criticized in particular.
However, the negativity did not change the fact that the A-RPG became very successful. Just one week after launch, sales of $10 million were reported, and the number kept rising. On July 28, analytics site SensorTower reported that Diablo Immortal had surpassed $100 million in sales taken in through Google Play Store and the App Store. This means that the figure is probably much higher, since PC revenue was not counted.
First threatening lockout, then exploding player numbers.
However, there was one big problem for Blizzard with Diablo Immortal. The launch in China, one of the largest mobile markets in the world, was supposed to take place in mid-June, but was on hold for a long time.
That’s why there were problems with China: The reason for a possible block of Diablo Immortal was a statement that allegedly came from one of the Blizzard employees from the marketing team. It indirectly demanded that the head of state of China, Xi Jinping, resign.
Accordingly, for some time it looked as if Blizzard’s license to release Diablo Immortal would be revoked by the state. But even that turned out positively for the game. Diablo Immortal celebrated its official launch in China on July 25, causing player numbers to skyrocket. Just 2 days before the release, the game’s official Twitter account celebrated that the number of active players exceeded 20 million.
Less than a week later, the next tweet followed, as that number was increased by a whopping 50% to 30 million. As a small “thank you”, players can receive an additional legendary emblem because of this, as well as 6 rare crates.
So Blizzard can probably look forward to a new revenue milestone soon, as mobile customers in China are known to have little problem with pay2win mechanics and heavy monetization.A Western player, on the other hand, tested how much loot a Free2Play player would receive in Diablo Immortal:
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