Diablo Immortal still hasn’t launched in China, and it’s costing Blizzard millions
Diablo Immortal is due to launch in select Asia Pacific regions but there’s still no word when it’ll launch in China, costing Blizzard an awful lot in potential revenue.
As announced in a recent Blizzard blog post (opens in new tab), Diablo Immortal will be launching in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macao, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam (on PC via open Beta only) tomorrow July 7, 2022. However, there’s still no word yet on when China will be able to experience the free-to-play MMO after it was delayed just days before it was due to launch in the country.
Diablo Immortal was supposed to launch in China on June 19 but Blizzard delayed the launch just three days before that targeted date. Developer NetEase said the decision was made in order to make "multiple optimization adjustments" but other than this, not much else has been revealed about the delay. It’s important to also note that around this time the Diablo Immortal Weibo account was banned from the Chinese social media platform. Neither Blizzard nor NetEase has given a reason for the account removal.
The fact Diablo Immortal is still yet to launch in China is probably doing more damage than we realize for Blizzard. As revealed by mobilegamer.biz (opens in new tab) (via AppMagic (opens in new tab)), the mobile and PC game has already earned $49 million with 10 million downloads within the first month of release. Considering the size of China’s gaming population and its widely-acknowledged comfort with big spending when it comes to in-game microtransactions, Blizzard is potentially losing out on a significant chunk of revenue for every day that Diablo Immortal is absent from the Chinese market.
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