Diablo Immortal is now available. The official MMORPG title from Blizzard, defying expectations with its superior game mechanics, furnishes an immersive playing experience on touchscreen smartphones. The full free mobile game delivers on all counts but with anything free, you have to take a cautious approach toward the monetization aspect as they usually contain indirect routes to extracting money from users. So let’s find out how bad is it in Diablo Immortal? In my personal experience, monetization veers more in the direction of expensive relative to other similar titles. That said, you can still play most of the game for free if you don’t veer too far from the causal path.
But what about the full-blown high-end gameplay? Regretfully, Blizzard intends to squeeze out every possible bit of pretty penny in exchange for allowing access to high-level aspects of the Diablo universe, with gamers having to shell out an inordinate amount in excess of $100k to max out a character.
As is the norm with pay-to-win titles, Diablo Immortal keeps its monetization scheme purposefully complex for expert players. Despite that, some enthusiasts on Reedit and Youtubers Gregg2G and Bellular News have explained the whole process in the simplest possible terms for everyone to easily grasp. For more, check out the Bellular News video below.
To illuminate the convoluted system in layman’s terms, you can make things easier with continuous improvements of your Diablo Immortal character once it hits the standard level cap, which requires Legendary Gems that are hard to acquire, especially the 5-star gem. You can equip each character with multiple gems that are possible to level up. Once you have unlocked level-up gems, further enhancements would push you to acquire Awakened, which you can then power up using the Resonance system.
The whole process seems like intentionally pushing players to jump through hoops and exert unnecessary effort if they want to keep playing for free. Of course, you can speed up the upgrade process using real money at any stage. According to estimates, someone wanting to build the best possible character 6 Ran-10 5-Star Legendary Gems with maximum Resonance could end up spending somewhere around $110,000 or more.
On a positive note, the game is still free-to-play, so it’s up to players’ discretion how much they spend. But these kinds of games entrap players, particularly those predisposed to addictive behavior, into a stealthy cycle of endless upgrades. And Blizzard, like any hyper-profiting-seeking enterprise, creates a game that nudges players to fork out such as huge sum on a single character shouldn’t come across as a shock.
