Diablo Immortal's very bad week

 Like Dominoes

During the high peaks of my sojourn, one of the most invigorating and depressing stories to follow was the whirlwind, turnbuckle insanity of 'Diablo Immortal's rollercoaster journey this way and that. "Oh, turns out it's a huge 20 million financial windful for Blizzard, guess they won guys!' 'Oh but that's a mere fraction of what Diablo 3 won in it's first week, 300 million for the record, so they lost guys!' 'Oh, but that's just what the prototypical growth model of mobile games looks like to begin with. They start small but with recurrent payments that build up over the years. They won guys, deal with it.' 'Oh, but it turns out that original figure of how much Immortal made isn't even direct figures but a broad-park estimate made by some outlet who's calculations got twisted into solid fact. I don't have any clue where they're at, guys!'. Yes, if you've been threating over the 20 million in one week figure that Diablo Immortal has had glued to it's name, fear not because there's no confirmation that is the case. Although maybe you should then fear more, because that's about the profit margins of a standardly profitable mobile game and Immortal's microtransactions are vampirically immoral; they most likely have made much more than that.

But at the end of the day the bottom line is that Diablo Immortal is a game that is very much trying to push the bar against the rights of the consumer so that the dial of 'what's acceptable' can be turned up beyond the current comfort margin of society. We've seen this done time and time again in the game's industry and the only way we can push back on it, make sure that others who see this experiment don't take it as a sign to gratefully follow their trend, is to utterly and bitterly reject it so bad that whenever Blizzard so much as mentions the words 'Diablo' and 'Immortal' in conjunction with each other it costs them money. This is the same procedure as what the Star Wars gaming community did to EA after Battlefront 2; and it absolutely worked. Although with some of the, frankly shocking, misfortunes that the Diablo team is suffering, I think the gaming community might be stepping on their toes a little harder than they did with EA already.

First I should start by saying that there's the age old excuse for games like these where 'it's not the developers who cause this, it's the producers!'. And whilst a lot of the times that is very much the case, it's by no way a catch-all. Sometimes developers push and believe in predatory microtransactions meant to drain player's dry all on their own, and the support of the producers is just a guaranteed bonus in that endeavour. Of course, it's impossible to say which is which without some sort of insider whistle-blower feeding us that juicy internal deets; but if I was a betting men I'd wager that the director of Immortal, Alex Chen, is one of the bad ones. Not just for that weirdly affronted response of "What, do you guys not have phones?" When this whole project was first called into question by the public, but also for the fact we've seen over the years screens of Alex Chen personally selling the greedy monetisation propositions (some of which didn't even make it into the full product for how over-the-line they were) directly towards NetEase. That's not exactly a smoking gun, but it is a hefty waft of smoke indicating some sort of nearby fire.

Now, Immortal is losing it's prominence: fast. From the beginning what this game had was the strength of the brand behind it as well as an ARPG market that hasn't been as flush with competition recently so they could get away with giving players an average ARPG that ran smoothly and convince them it was a 'great game'. (I stand by my assertations; Diablo Immortal is not a 'great game' under it's predatory machinations; it's average at best, mediocre against any serious, even dated, competition.) That goodwill and fame was shored up with the release, mostly successfully, of 'Diablo 2: Resurrected'. Since then the Diablo name has been dragged brutally through the mud to the point where Immortal won the spot of worst user rated game on Meta Critic beating out the previous record holder- which was another Blizzard game, 'Warcraft 3: Reforged'.

In those early days there was a flush of content creators who wanted to stare in wonderment at the traincrash, but now the devastation is becoming too distasteful even for them. (Or they're just bored of the cycle; that would be fair.) One of the most controversial of which being the couple of big streamers who were intentionally 'whaling' on the game in order to mock the extent of microtransaction culture required in order to get cool gear or reach a competitive state. People raise their brow at such a backwards protest, but in truth is does really help to see that cycle played out in real time with a constant visual counter letting people know exactly how much money went into it. One streamer spent around about 15,000 dollars in order to get a single best-in-slot gem which, to remind you, is only the best on offer for the base edition of Diablo Immortal, the second there's an update that gem is going to need to be replaced. And another spent around 25,000. Both subsequently quit the game the moment they were done making their point, and with that the viewership of Immortal really dried up.

This live service dropped a month ago and is seeing around about 1.5k average Twitch viewers. A fan site for creating professional build guides, which worked on the beta and alpha for Diablo Immortal, ended up dropping their support for the game in protest of what it became. Sentiments are almost universally negative towards the game and any of the indoctrinated who blindly support it. Diablo just isn't living it's best life through Immortal right now, and it's starting to taint the confidence in Blizzard outside of the core fanbase who had already given up on the company in their hearts. Of course, this is a double edged blade for the people to wield as the dropping interest from the wider world is leaving the Diablo Immortal game to be gobbled up by the whales whom, assuming they stick around, will continue to feed this game for the money goblins free from the judgement of everyone else. It's so hard to see if we're spitting in Diablo Immortal's face or playing directly into their hands!

Although one instance which absolutely is not playing to the favour of the Blizzard ghouls is the Chinese release. The entire model of Diablo Immortal was built expressly to take advantage of the huge Chinese market for mobile gamers and exploit the heck out of their lack of community enforced game design standards. NetEase was bought abroad because of their connections in China. All roads led to that market. Which is why it is so incredible that someone, who cannot be identified so I can but assume he did so with full knowledge of how next-level of a protest this was, from the American-side of Blizzard logged into the Chinese marketing account and tweeted out a phrase to the tune of "When will the Bear fall off of his seat?" Now of course this refers to the embarrassing insecurities of China's leader Xi Jinping, for his detested visual comparisons to Winnie the Pooh, and the fact that he's a dictator who will never step down from his position. Pretty volatile stuff, and the consequence were swift and glorious.

For bending over backwards in order to curry favour with a dictatorship, Blizzard won themselves a immediately halted release for a game they were literally on the cusp of dropping and since then the game was banned from China completely completely. Maybe Blizzard will find a distribution method to sneak around this ban, but good lord is that a protest! Someone basically said "You ruin my industry, I'll gouge our your profit margins!" Way to kick Blizzard where it hurts! (Assuming this was done intentionally; which I absolutely believe it was but for the sake of the argument I have to accept the possibility that it might not have been. But come on; 'When will the bear fall of his seat'? Why would you text that in your personal accounts? What value does that vacuous statement have beyond triggering fragile egos?) Diablo Immortal is an example of the worst tendencies of the gaming industry being bloated into a disaster and those who excuse it are inviting those practises to become mainstays. So if Diablo Immortal is to die and drag Blizzard into the ground along with it, then I say good riddance; a company who allows that don't deserve any more benefits of the doubt.