Diablo Immortal

• 1. Introduction

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  Diablo Immortal arrived on the 2nd of June 2022, and within a single week it had become the biggest launch in the Diablo franchise's history. By the end of July, thirty million people had downloaded it. Yet at the very same moment, the PC version was earning a user score of 0.2 out of 10 on Metacritic, the lowest rating the site had ever recorded for a game. A single title had somehow achieved record-breaking commercial success and historic critical contempt at exactly the same time.

  How did a game get here? The story begins four years earlier, in a convention hall packed with fans who had traveled expecting one announcement and received something else entirely. It runs through secret alpha tests in Australia, a social media ban in China tied to Winnie the Pooh, and a YouTuber who calculated that fully upgrading a character might require approximately one hundred thousand dollars. The game that sparked all of this was built from scratch on a new engine, co-developed across two companies, and designed to reach people who had never touched a Diablo game before.

• 2. A Hall Full of Phones

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  BlizzCon in November 2018 was the moment everything went sideways. Blizzard took the stage at the opening ceremony and announced that the next entry in the beloved Diablo series would be a mobile game. The crowd's reaction was immediate and hostile. Fans had gathered expecting news of a PC sequel, and some in the audience openly compared Immortal to what they called a reskin of prior NetEase titles such as Crusaders of Light and Endless of God.

  Two questions aimed at Wyatt Cheng, Principal Game Designer at Blizzard, drew the most attention. One attendee asked whether the announcement was an "out of season April Fools' joke." Another asked whether a PC version was possible, and when the answer was no, the crowd booed. Cheng then rhetorically asked "Do you guys not have phones?" That line became a meme inside the Diablo community almost immediately.

  The financial fallout was swift. Activision Blizzard's stock fell 7% on the first weekday of trading after the announcement. Blizzard's newly appointed president, J Allen Brack, addressed fans in the weeks that followed, framing the intensity of the reaction as evidence of how deeply players cared about the franchise. He stated his belief that Immortal would "deliver a very authentic Diablo experience" and that Blizzard would not release it until the game met the community's "very high standards." Blizzard also confirmed that multiple other unannounced Diablo projects remained in development, pushing back against the rumor that Immortal's announcement had displaced a main sequel.

• 3. Built From Scratch

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  Diablo Immortal was co-developed by Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase, the same company Blizzard partners with for Chinese market releases. The game's director, Wyatt Cheng, and its senior combat designer, Julian Love, both came from the Diablo III team. Both brought features to Immortal that they had been unable to include in that predecessor.

  The engine powering the game was called the Messiah Engine, a platform new to NetEase and not used for any prior NetEase title. During a February 2021 interview, a development team member was direct about this: "It is a wholly new game that we've built." The team also ran a structured feedback process during alpha testing, holding a team-wide summit over a video call where they went through player submissions line by line. One concrete result of that process was strengthening the Wizard class's ice-based attacks, after players widely reported the class felt "underpowered."

  The game was originally designed exclusively for touchscreen devices, with a virtual thumbstick and skill buttons overlaid on the display. Skills included auto-aim toward the nearest enemy, with the option to manually aim by holding a button. Blizzard later confirmed a PC beta would launch alongside the mobile release, and in an interview with GameSpot, senior designer Scott Burgess said they had taken "so long" to announce the PC version because they "wanted to make sure the polish of the game was at a point where we were happy with it." The PC version added WASD keyboard movement, a first for any Diablo game on PC.

• 4. Testing Across Two Years

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  A "very limited" public alpha launched in December 2020, restricted to Android players in Australia. It covered only the first 45 character levels and four of the game's six planned classes. Media outlets received access alongside the public, but no character progress from the alpha carried forward into the final game.

  At BlizzConline in February 2021, the team discussed what would come next: another alpha, this time expected to include the full 60-level cap, all six classes, and more story content. A second closed alpha followed in April 2021, still limited to Australian Android players, and introduced the Crusader class, raised the level cap to 55, and debuted the Cycle of Strife faction system, which the team kept running for "at least a month" to gather enough data on the feature.

  Activision Blizzard's first-quarter earnings in May 2021 described the game as "on track for global release later in 2021," but by August 2021, Blizzard had announced a delay into the first half of 2022. The stated reasons included making the Cycle of Strife more accessible, improving the Helliquary raid feature, adding controller support, and refining character progression. A closed beta then launched on the 28th of October 2021, initially for Android players in Australia and Canada, later expanding to Korea, Japan, and China. That beta ran for just under three months and, among other additions, shifted the Cycle of Strife climax from an 8 vs. 8 battle format to the Challenge of the Immortal, a 30-versus-1 showdown built around the top-ranked Immortal faction player.

• 5. The Business of Sanctuary

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  Diablo Immortal is free to play, but its monetization structure became the defining controversy of its existence. The game uses multiple in-game currencies: gold, earned through normal play; platinum, obtainable through gameplay or purchase; and eternal orbs, a premium currency bought with real money. Eternal orbs can be spent on cosmetics and on platinum, which in turn funds the in-game marketplace.

  At the center of the criticism was the legendary crest system. Legendary crests, available through purchase, improve the rewards from rift dungeons, including the chance to earn legendary gems used to upgrade equipment. The crest system was formally classified as a "loot box" mechanic because of its random rewards. In the days after launch, publications reported on calculations by YouTuber Bellular News that fully upgrading a character could cost approximately one hundred thousand dollars in real-world money, or roughly ten years of free play. A Twitch streamer reportedly spent NZ$25,166 (approximately $15,997) attempting to illustrate the progression system before receiving any top-level legendary gems. Later estimates from players on Twitter and Reddit revised those figures upward to between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand dollars, once gem slot interactions at maximum rank were factored in.

  Blizzard's representatives responded by pointing to "high user reviews on the App Store," stating that the monetization only appears at the endgame and that "hundreds of millions of people can go through the whole campaign without any costs." They also reported that 50% of player accounts were newly registered with Blizzard, meaning a large share of the audience had never played a prior Diablo title. Critics were not satisfied. Den of Geek described the microtransactions as "malicious," and Polygon argued they felt like "the final ingredient that allows an already-addictive series to attain its true form."

• 6. The China Delay

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  The Asia-Pacific release of Diablo Immortal was originally scheduled for the 23rd of June 2022, three weeks after the global launch. On June 15, the game's official account on the Chinese social media platform Weibo was reportedly banned for "violating relevant laws and regulations." Publications speculated that the ban followed an alleged post referencing Winnie the Pooh, a symbol widely used to criticize Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The post had reportedly since been deleted.

  Four days after the ban, Blizzard and NetEase announced the Asia-Pacific launch would be delayed for "a number of optimization adjustments," citing improvements to device compatibility, network performance, and stability. NetEase promised affected players an "exclusive thank-you package containing legendary equipment" as an apology. NetEase's share price fell significantly in the days surrounding these events.

  The game eventually launched across most affected markets on the 8th of July 2022. China, which had already received over fifteen million pre-registrations, received no confirmed release date at that point. NetEase later set the 25th of July 2022 as the China launch. Because the Weibo account remained banned, no social media announcement accompanied the launch; instead, the team quietly set up pre-launch marketing pages on the App Store and TapTap. On the game's first two days in China, Immortal ranked first in iOS video game downloads, and some players on busy regional servers faced queues of over five thousand people.

• 7. After Launch

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  The updates came quickly after release. A Season 2 patch on the 7th of July 2022 brought a new battle pass, a new Helliquary boss, and new cosmetic items. The Class Change feature, which allowed players to switch character classes without losing progress and at no cost, went live on July 20. A month later, two limited-time game modes appeared: the Fractured Plane, a fifteen-floor roguelike dungeon where players begin with basic gear and build up using items salvaged from enemies, and the Echo of the Immortal, a PVP mode letting players outside the Immortals faction experience a version of the Challenge of the Immortal.

  The game's first major content update, titled "Forgotten Nightmares," landed in late September 2022, introducing Castle Cyrangar as a new explorable location for warband groups. October 2022 brought server transfers at player request, along with a merger of North American servers, consolidating twelve servers per data center into groups of three to increase active player counts. A second major update, "Terror's Tide," released on the 14th of December 2022, included the salt-scrubbed prison island of Stormpoint and new options for character appearance customization.

  The game's first brand-new character class in two years, the Blood Knight, was revealed in early July 2023. Described as a "vanquisher of vampires" specializing in polearm weapons, it was the first original class added to the Diablo series since the Crusader appeared in 2014. A second original class, the Tempest, was announced on the 7th of May 2024, and released on May 23. On the 12th of December 2024, the "Shattered Sanctuary" update introduced the game's first encounter with Diablo himself, described by GameSpot as "the game's largest new zone to date" and "its biggest boss battle yet." Lead content designer Scott Burges described the design goal: "This Diablo is holding basically a weapon of mass destruction, one of the Worldstone Shards, and this is allowing him to be bigger and more dangerous than ever."