Diablo Immortal or the success of mediocrity

I think it’s important to start from the bottom line that Diablo Immortal doesn’t feel like a bad game (or even a good one) per se. It managed to bring a good fraction of what the original PC experience (the platform it also landed on) to the mobile gaming ecosystem. And yet it feels like a joke and another sign that it’s been a while the video game sector suffers from an endemic evil that we can call shareholders.

You might be thinking that here comes grandpa’s plate of chives, remembering the days when you bought a set and ran out of money, the tomato tasted like a tomato and this was all the countryside. And you are not wrong.

I started by saying that Diablo Immortal, that is, Diablo for mobile sa port for PC it’s a bad taste joke. And before the defenders of Blizzard jump to the jugular, I think it is necessary to remind that it was Blizzard themselves who, a few years ago, chose as an April Fool’s Day prank to announce the release of a mobile version of Diablo. With this joke, Blizzard proved that they have a good grasp of the pulse of their community, for whom Diablo for mobile was something they’d been waiting for since about then, never, and didn’t care in the slightest.

And what happened between the Diablo mobile tease and the first Diablo Immortal mobile announcement? The smartphone gaming market has grown like an avalanche. Sorry, I didn’t explain it well, I meant to say smartphone game market with microtransactions, models pay to win and other little things which don’t add anything to the players (rather take away), but make the shareholders start clapping their ears the moment they order three more caviar dump trucks and lay off 10% of the workforce.

Something we hear with almost every free-to-play game release with microtransactions is that they won’t affect gameplay, that you won’t have to spend a single penny to enjoy the full gaming experience. And that’s true, but only half true, so it’s actually a lie. From the time it takes to progress to getting the most desired items, they make more and more players prefer to make some payments in order to devote tens or hundreds of hours (in some cases even thousands) to achieving goals that, if there were no microtransactions, in such games could be completed in more reasonable time frames. This happens with Diablo Immortal, but also with almost everyone else.

And the problem is that this model has finally penetrated many users, for whom the payment of one, five or ten euros is compensated by what they get out of it. An example with Diablo Immortal can be seen in the numbers: more than 20 million dollars entered in the first two weeks, and as we can read on TechSpot, it closed its first month with $50 million in revenue. Maybe it’s a better game than I think? In this case, I am not the only one, becausethe Metacritic score is still very low.

Diablo Immortal is another game that taps into that dynamic, yes, but it’s also a game from a developer that many years ago thought of it as a joke, something absurd, something that didn’t make sense. But, of course, shareholders and greed rule the roost, and many players are backing away from what already appears to be a model here to stay. Average model in which we change the game for pay.

The good news is that regulations have already prevented Diablo Immortal from coming to some markets, and the future trend in this regard suggests that this list will continue to grow.