Diablo Immortal was originally supposed to be Activision Blizzard’s flagship breakout mobile game, but the game has come under scrutiny and criticism for its strikingly predatory monetization scheme. The message that players might need hundreds of thousands of dollars to max out their characters immediately made headlines, and it looks like the controversy isn’t over yet.
Namely, Maxroll has just announced the end of its Diablo Immortal branch, which is an unprecedented move for one of the largest and most authoritative RPG guide sites on the web. AT official communicationdetailing this decision, explains that the Maxroll community is the most important aspect of the team’s efforts, and the company basically cannot continue to release Immortal manuals in good faith.
Stories of streamers spending thousands of dollars on Diablo Immortal only to never get the coveted items they need to progress in the game are becoming more common as more and more players struggle with the endgame. This, as expected, is one of the main reasons Maxroll decided to stop releasing game manuals, though not the only one. According to them, Immortal currently has a few major issues: its economic structure, community frustration with the game, and generally unhelpful gameplay.
Maxroll also explained that it’s not about money at the moment and said that Activision Blizzard will have to move away from pay-to-win mechanics and the statement said that “[они] can’t see a way forward” unless the game gets a major overhaul in this regard. Maxroll’s Diablo Immortal team of experts have spent a total of over 10,000 hours of gameplay studying the game over the past year and a half, and the company still felt it had to give up from the project to do the right thing with their community.
While it was originally estimated that players would need just over $100,000 to maximize their characters in the game, further revelations revealed that it would actually take over $500,000 to maximize a character in Immortal. This reveal came as players unlocked some of the game’s most obscure mechanics, including the so-called Awakening, which unlocks even more gem slots for the character.
It seems less and less likely that Activision Blizzard will eventually remake Diablo Immortal to be a less predatory game. In fact, the community’s main concern right now is whether Diablo 4 could have the same issues as Immortal, as the company announced that its upcoming flagship RPG will be a game as a service rather than a one-time standalone release.