Blizzard boss: “Diablo Immortal” in-app purchase is not guilty, most people can get 99.5% of the experience without spending money_China IT News

IT House July 7 news, “Diablo: Immortal” is a free massive online multiplayer action role-playing game jointly developed by Blizzard and NetEase. It was announced at the end of 2018 and has only been launched so far. The national service was originally scheduled for June 23 but has been postponed, and the official launch date has not yet been announced.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra defended Diablo: Immortal’s poorly-reviewed microtransaction system. Incorporating microtransactions allows the studio to offer a free Diablo experience to millions of players, he said.

“When we think about monetization, the first thing to think about is — how do we provide a free Diablo experience to hundreds of millions of players so they can do 99.5% of the things in the game?” he said.

“Monetization is the endgame of the game,” Ybarra added. “Our philosophy has always been about great gameplay and ensuring that hundreds of millions of people can play through the entire game without any cost. From that standpoint, I think it does a very good job. “

A Blizzard representative said the “vast majority” of Diablo Immortal is free-to-play, although no specific numbers were provided.

Of course, this does not seem to be a real relationship between everyone. The vast majority of players will not pay anything in free games. After all, they just log in and play for a few minutes until the paid content pops up and then uninstalls directly.

Foreign media pointed out that we must understand that those who are affected are those die-hard Diablo fans who are easily attracted by the free-to-play mechanics. Foreign media believe that free-to-play games are to not exploit their most loyal users rather than to make money. For the last high-sounding reason, he didn’t understand why anyone could describe a mechanism that charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single character as a free-to-play game. Having said that, Blizzard is undoubtedly accelerating its move into mobile, and as Ybarra said, Blizzard’s focus on traditional PC gaming is a thing of the past…

I hope we can grow the franchise to give players a better experience on a more regular basis, while expanding our world across devices. Just releasing a game on PC doesn’t serve the people who play games today.

IT House learned that this free MMO game was released for the global iOS and Android platforms on June 2, and was publicly tested on PC, but soon received a lot of bad reviews due to its excessive “forced krypton” .

In the first week of the game’s launch, some big V calculated that players need to spend an average of 110,000 US dollars (actually, it is an indeterminate amount between 100,000 and 600,000 US dollars) or desperately “liver” for 10 years to fully “graduate” a character.

Last month, the game’s Metacritic rating dropped to 0.2/10, the lowest level in the site’s history. Based on 4527 user reviews, it currently ranks 0.3 (lowest).

In addition, the game has 114,000 and 673,000 user reviews on the App Store (4.5 points) and Play Store (3.7 points), respectively.