Official Twitter account of Diablo Immortal declared: “In just one week, Diablo Immortal is the biggest launch title in the franchise’s history.” Accompanying the statement is an image revealing that the game has been installed more than 10 million times since launch.
However, it should be noted that Diablo Immortal is a game free-to-play first in the series and Blizzard is comparing the launch of this game with titles that have a specific list price. In terms of total player count, Immortal still has a way to go if it wants to surpass it Diablo III – the game was claimed by Blizzard to have sales of 30 million copies in August 2015 (may not include expansion pack sales).
Blizzard’s statement may upset some players as Immortal has continuously received backlash for its use of ‘pay-to-win’ microtransactions, especially for its PvP modes. The game’s user scores on Metacritic are the lowest in Blizzard’s history, with scores for the iOS and PC versions being 0.5/10 and 0.4/10 respectively. This f2p MMO was released on June 2 on iOS and Android and as an open beta on PC, but quickly received negative feedback from the community because of its heavy focus on paid transactions. Some have calculated that it could cost players up to $110,000 USD to fully upgrade a single character in the game.
On the iOS AppStore and Google Play CH, Diablo Immortal still receives quite good review scores, 4.6/5 and 3.6/5 respectively. The explanation for this may be that Immortal’s initial paid transactions are still reasonable, but once players reach the end-game, they start to feel uncomfortable.
