Blizzard’s boss has defended Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has defended Diablo Immortal’s heavily criticised use of microtransactions.
In a Los Angeles Times interview, Ybarra said the inclusion of microtransactions allowed the studio to offer a free Diablo experience to many millions of players.
“When we think about monetization, at the very highest level it was, ‘How do we give a free Diablo experience to hundreds of millions of people, where they can literally do 99.5% of everything in the game?’” he said.
“The monetization comes in at the end game,” Ybarra added. “The philosophy was always to lead with great gameplay and make sure that hundreds of millions of people can go through the whole campaign without any costs. From that standpoint, I feel really good about it as an introduction to Diablo.”
The free-to-play MMO was released on June 2 for iOS and Android, and as an open beta on PC, but quickly drew a negative reception for its heavy focus on microtransactions.
This included a report published during the game’s opening weekend which calculated that it could cost players up to $110,000 to fully upgrade a character.
Last month the game’s Metacritic user score dropped to 0.2/10 – the lowest ever in the review aggregation website’s history. It currently stands at 0.3 (the joint lowest) based on 4,527 user reviews.
It should be noted that Metacritic user scores do not require proof that the user has even played the game before submitting a score, and that other factors, such as recent Activision Blizzard controversies, may have had an influence.
The game is also enjoying notably better user scores on the App Store (4.5 out of 5) and Google Play store (3.7 out of 5), based on 114,000 and 673,000 user reviews respectively.
According to the LA Times,
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