The endgame of Mobile games

 Suffering from success

So 'Diablo Immortal' is a pretty obvious smokescreen as far as shady gaming schemes go. A game designed to be a total social pariah, ruin the respectability of every face involved with it, be the reviled monster poisoning the industry specifically so that Diablo 4 can drop doing considerably less scummy things than it, and look like a grand resurgence for the companies quality standards. Hell, they'll probably still make it a pay-to-win cesspit, but it just won't be as pay-to-win as Diablo Immortal was, which is an improvement, I guess. But inbetween now and then, we have to deal with this ugly exercise into the absolute extremes of video game greed and the societal excrement who support and reward Blizzard for going around mugging their consumer base and calling it a solid marketing move. One such extreme from this development became frightening clear; the whale amongst whales.

Whale is a term used to describe the sorts of individuals who spend their exorbitant wads of money into Free-to-Play games in order to jump ahead of everyone else. They are referred as whales, because the size of their purchases pretty much cements them as single sources of heavy revenue that makes them more valuable players than others the petty 'plankton' who drop a dollar or two once a month. So essentially paying money makes you a player that the developers want to cater their content more towards in order to curry more favour and attention. Just like real life, the richer you are, the more bottom-feeders you ascertain; in this instance it's the developers. Games like Diablo Immortal thrive off the existence of Whales by creating heavy money sinks that players can drop their money into in a play against the odds to get the best stats. Pay-to-Win, as it's most commonly known. (Although pay-to-not-play, is a common refrain; considering most of this stuff revolves around paying to skip the process of earning the accolades.)

Of course, when you invest heavily in pay-to-win it's going to upset the balance of the game as players with larger wallets can invest more money to surpass the efforts of players who can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars rolling a virtual die. They push far above the free-to-play players, and then you get into a virtual arms-race of who can spend the most money to get atop those other spenders in what should ideally be a never ending cycle of idiots falling for the most obvious cash-grab scheme in the world. But this has usually been where interest from the common audience drops off, because no one really cares who ultimately tops the pile. But as curiosity would be served, recently we've had an account of exactly that scenario presented by a content creator who managed to push themselves to that precipice and had their game time suffer because of it.  

Yes, we're talking about a man who, by his own words, spent around about $100,000 all on trying to get the optimal character in Diablo immortal so that his clan could rule the meta game as the 'Immortals' of his server. It's a pretty old-school method of content creation where the draw of the creator is their skill rather than their Charisma; but listening to this man speak for any amount of time will demonstrate that he has a lack of both, which is probably why he likes pay-to-win games so much. (I'm being deliberately venomous. I'm sure the guy has some skill with these sorts of games to be able to utilise the spending as he has. Does that make him a good person? No. A smart one. No. But one worthy of even the slightest modicum of respect? Still no.) But reaching the top of the pile inexplicably ended up putting his current favourite pastime in jeopardy.

You see, putting himself in the Pay-To-Win category allowed him to play the PVP battlegrounds modes for Diablo Immortal over and over again to rack up over 300 straight wins and less than 10 losses. He could just steamroll over everyone with less powerful gear than him. He could be the big fish in the tiny pond, soaking up all the water and making sure the stats of his character outshone anyone else in the world. Until it got to the point where the game's matchmaker realised that this player is too good for even the best players in the game and bracketed him off in a custom made pool of players which seems to consist of only him. Meaning that our man couldn't que for more Battlegrounds because the game couldn't find enough players of a equal win/loss ratio to pit him against. Cutting him off from what he himself considers his 'favourite activity' in the game. Bummer.

Even worse than that, a bug within the structure of the gameplay made him unable to que his clan into a contest to defend their position, or maybe they were already queued? The system was really unclear on that matter, and that's kind of the problem. Being the biggest clan on their server, not knowing what they're doing to defend their position is kind of emasculating for a breed of player which is obviously driven by the vapid desire to enforce their archaic concepts of masculine supremacy on others. Basically, I'm saying that Blizzard's distinct lack of comprehensive design decisions (because they were too busy hyper-focusing on running the gem market) wasn't serving their most important customers; the numbskulls with more money than brain wrinkles. Which is just typical, isn't it? Blizzard are such a mess of a company that they can't serve their established fanbase or the rich rubes they're trying to replace them with. Just a trainwreck of customer support.

Of course, the person we're talking about here did put over a hundred thousand into the game, meaning that when he made a big stink about it online, Blizzard did get around to promising him a personalised fix in the next few days; but that was only after passing him around fang-less customer support reps for weeks on end. Turn out all the money in the world only translates into respect when you make a public statement which might ward off other whales. Of course, Blizzard could give less of a crap if you aren't a wealthy player, that makes you less than scum to wipe off their shoes. Because that's who Blizzard are nowadays. Nakedly and unabashedly twisted to serve the biggest potential returners and step on all those desperate to support a company they used to trust years ago. Big Blizzard are, no surprise, not your friend. 

But this has really laid out the very extremes of Mobile Gaming that we never really think of. How does the service have to mould to cater to the top of the pile? The king of the kings; the Immortal of this ecosystem? And what does it mean to win in a pay-to-win environment? Is it being better than everyone else? Because our guy here apparently is driven by a desire to just crush people poorer than him all day, without any real challenge or danger to his own position due to the exorbitant amounts of money that he's spent, which might spell out more regarding his own personality than I think even he has considered. If the endgame is supposed to be a mad crawl to the top that is feasibly never supposed to end; how do you reconcile devising a social interaction game where the chief goal it to isolate yourself from your peers atop a pile of money? And how is a studio supposed to work to benefit the king's experience alongside trying to encourage their just as wealthy opponents to forever topple them? Are you the protagonist at that point, or the antagonist in the grand tapestry of this online world? And at the end of the day, is there any difference?

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.

Diablo Immortal has arrived

 It's Morbing time

Have you ever been introduced to something, a game, a movie, a person, and known instantly from the very first moment exactly where this relationship between you is going? I'm not talking a 'love at first sight' sort of thing, no I mean rather the opposite. I mean you know from the very first word that you two are going to bitterly clash until there's nothing but hatred and anger shared between the two of your totally incompatible personalities? How about a situation where you've felt that exact friction only to be proven completely and utterly false as something magical and special blossoms from fields you'd thought initially barren? Diablo Immortal falls into one of those two camps. Can you guess which one? Shocker, it's the "We knew it would be a disgrace to the brand and company and that is exactly what it is." What, do you guys at Blizzard not have integrity or something?

Diablo Immortal is an attempt by Blizzard to move their popular ARPG property, the Diablo series, onto the mobile market in order to cater to the plethora of mobile addicted players in China and Japan. If you want to be an optimist you could say that this is a Diablo game made for our Eastern Asian brothers that is trying to clue them in on something we already love over here, although you'd have to be almost reductively optimistic not to acknowledge the ways in which Blizzard is trying to actively exploit their platform of choice in order to squeeze bucks out of them. Because you see, despite the pedigree of the name attached to this product, despite the months of press junkets where the Diablo development team have promised that this game is going to rewrite what we expect from mobile games and has as big of a development team working on it as Diablo 3 and 4, (that's just sad if it's true) this is a blatant cash-grap, yo!

At least it's not a lazy one. I mean, the way in which they try and squeeze money out of everyone is lazy, tired and uninventive; but the actual quality of the mobile gameplay in question here is decent. It's not the world's best ARPG by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't find the early story to be any type of engaging or interesting, but the core ARPG experience of killing things is fun enough. Would I choose to play Immortal over Diablo 3? Not currently. But then I am early game, maybe the endgame is some super wild amazing feast of chaos and I just need to spend a couple of hundred real life currency on in order to boost my way to the great content. Oh, did I say money boosting? Yeah, this game has it's pay-to-win elements which is obscured behind distanced 'fake' currency and upgrade percentage chances that has the option to eat up premium currency. (That's how you sneak all the chance based money generating fun of Lootboxes without bringing the inherent backlash that Lootboxes come with. Class.)

What gets me is I thought Diablo Immortal had come out years ago and just faded from the public consciousness super quickly, but I guess Wyatt Cheng took the verbal tongue lashing he got at the Blizzcon reveal to heart and crawled under that rock he spawned from in order to wait out the backlash. Of course his absence and this game's gave the time for emotions to cool into a simmer, but it also gave us a chance to see more stolen snippets of Wyatt, such as that one screenshot of him presenting the pay-to-win equipment reinforcing systems to a board of, what I can only assume are, NetEase employees. Leaving no one in any doubt for ages exactly what this game was about and who it was being made for. People were sharpening their pitchforks for this game for a long time in advance and now they're ready to cut it to ribbons. Of course, Wyatt and his Diablo don't give two handshakes and a wink about the actual Blizzard and Diablo fans; they're out for them casuals, baby!

It's at the heart of the gameplay loop, a regular stream of unimposing simple combat encounters that inundate the player with levels and loot at a quick pace to get new casual players, unfamiliar to ARPGs, thinking "Wow, I'm progressing really quickly and having fun", so that as the later levels kick in and the experience starts to hit against that inevitable wall, these same players are incentivised and encouraged to stick around and push themselves up against that wall, typically a pay wall in this instance, in order to relive some of that power fantasy fun they had at the beginning of their playthrough. Gear becomes outpaced by hoards of trash mobs, forcing players to fall back on the monetised-to-hell upgrade systems or to grind side content during which they are assaulted with pop-ups trying to sell them extra completion loot for some real money fee. I completed the damn dungeon, why not just give me all the loot! It's not as though dungeon loot isn't going to depreciate within a level or two, why flog extra units on the side? Because it's a way to get the casual player to make that all-important first purchase, because once they're in the door it's oh so much easier to lock them into the loop of recurrent purchases. 

But there are other points of contention beyond the monetisation that has people dubious about Diablo Immortal, one of which being the mysterious and so-far unutilised files in the game folder that make explicit mention of facial recognition. This isn't just laymen misunderstanding of file naming conventions, either; the community manager responded to one concerned Tweet highlighting it with the excuse that their team was at one point looking to have the ingame character's facial expressions match the player's face but they scrapped the system for not meeting their quality standards. An alright explanation, but it rings a little odd, doesn't it? You wanted facial match-up tech in your uninspired casual mobile game? Seems like a strangely innovative tech angle totally not-in line with all the other middle-of-the-road and unambitious design decisions for the game. Also, what use is matched facial expression in an APRG? A zoomed-out top down game where you can't see your character's face? Surely they can't be talking about the character portrait, because that portrait can't even be customised to the player's liking beyond picking the class featured. I can't say for sure, but I think they're lying to our faces.

Of all of this I think the most galling knowledge is what I mentioned earlier; how the team working on this game is apparently 1:1 comparable to Diablo 4's in size, if not in ambition. Blizzard truly value this game as much as they do their core franchise, and you can bet your bottom dollar that renewed intrest in the mobile markets comes directly from the success of an actual innovative little free-to-play game called Genshin Impact. Another game which wears it's monetisation on it's sleeve but slathers so much content which can be enjoyed totally for free that people just let it slide. Can Diablo Immortal slither it's way into a similar position with it's content proposal? With some finesse, but after all the garish tactics being shoved in our face and artificial difficulty pseudo-paywalls being erected, I don't think this development team knows what 'Finesse' is. I wonder what the team at Diablo 4 are doing to differentiate that game from Immortal, or if the mandate is for all Blizzard games to follow this formula into the future in the blind hope that one strikes it big. I'm being alarmist, perhaps; but not unrealistically so, and that's the problem. 

Diablo Immortal presented itself as the game that would rewrite our preconceived notions on what a mobile game is, greedy, exploitative and low effort; when it ended up pretty much sliding into the perfect ballpark for two out of three of those tags. The problem is that the accolade for 'so good it's allowed to nickel and dime' was given out two years ago and Blizzard lacks the talent and passion to steal that podium position for the folks at MiHiYo. What we're left with is a decent stop-gap ARPG for people who can't afford a mainline Diablo game, but is it really any better than 'Path of Exile'? I guess if you have to play a CRPG on your phone, than Diablo Immortal and all of it's ugliness is your only choice; that's about as glowing of an endorsement as I can lay on Immortal's door. Let's hope this whole experience doesn't end up being prophetic towards the eventual state of Diablo 4, eh.