With all of its problems, Diablo Immortal could very well be one of the biggest disappointments in the video games industry this year. It was supposed to be Blizzard's breakthrough title on mobile, but instead has become a huge letdown for many fans of the franchise, with many criticizing its rapacious monetization scheme. Despite all that, however, Diablo Immortal is apparently still making a lot of money daily.
Released on June 2, Diablo Immortal is the first game in the Diablo series that was specifically developed for the mobile platform in collaboration with NetEase. Being a mobile game, it's also the first Diablo game to employ the free-to-play model. Unfortunately, that also leads to Diablo Immortal having a very obvious pay-to-win model, with free players having their progression significantly hindered unless they opt to pay for some of the in-game purchases.
Criticism aside, it is now reported that Diablo Immortal is making more than $1 million per day. The report first came from MobileGamer.biz, citing data from AppMagic as a reference. According to the report, revenue from Diablo Immortal peaked ten days after launch, with Blizzard earning $2.4 million. Now, over a month after its release and with continuous negative public sentiment still being brought up every now and then, Diablo Immortal is surprisingly still able to pull in just a little less than half of what it made daily during the first two weeks.
It's worth noting that Blizzard so far has never published any data regarding revenues from Diablo Immortal, especially with the game being released fairly recently, so fans might as well take this claim with a grain of salt. However, some interested parties have broken down the game's monetization scheme and concluded that Diablo Immortal's microtransactions are predatory by design, meaning that the game has great potential to rake in huge profits.
If anything, it seems likely that many fans are getting more perturbed by the claim that Blizzard is still making a lot of money from Diablo Immortal after all the scrutiny. Many would find it hard to believe that Diablo Immortal is able to become such an effective money-making machine despite being the worst game on Metacritic in terms of user score. One can only hope that this would not affect anything the Diablo 4 team has in mind and set that game off the same dark path.
Diablo Immortal is available now on Android, iOS, and PC.
Source: MobileGamer.biz