During the opening ceremony of BlizzCon 2018, Blizzard Entertainment unveiled a mobile game in the Diablo franchise. Diablo: Immortal is an RPG for mobile devices, coming to both Android and iOS.
On mobile the games are cheap and there's a lot of "free" games with micro-transaction crap going on so you might think there's not much to earn there, but at the same time those games look like they are a lot less work to create because they are crappier than PC and console games. When you are successful the profits are probably gigantic.
All practically completeable content done within like a month. Still kind of mad I payed the money for that one, but friends were hyped.
Meanwhile, still grinding out content for Path of Exile pretty much straight since beta in 2012. Sure it has flaws, but its always been there for me and fun enough.
The announcement at this point is merely amusing and consistent with what I've come to expect from an out-of-touch megacorp that can't see past the dollar signs.
My favorite clip comes from Blizzcon. The guy on stage (after the booing) asks "You all have phones right?"
I literally shouted at the screen "But that's not the point!"
Then again, I am not a fan of anything Blizzard has done. Overwatch is a pay-for version of Smite. D3 was (to me) terrible in implementation. And I tried World of Warcraft... once... I couldn't bring myself to pay for it.
I have no real opinion on Star Craft 2, but I can't be bothered to install Battle.Net or use yet-another-god-damn-DRM.
Starcraft 2 is actually pretty good. Sadly their unicorn design team lost that gritty dark theme that they've always had in their games. I'm almost done with the Zerg campaign in SC2. So far, the story and what not is fun. Wings of Liberty (human campaign) I believe is free now.
The irony for me is I was actually interested in checking this out, then I found out my favorite hero the witch doctor was completely left out.... *shrug* now I have zero interest.
Sucks how they are using the Chinese market as the example. The low development costs, yet high revenue does make sense.
How big is the mobile revenue in the west? Is it much smaller than that of Korea, Japan, China? Hell the rest of Asia. Their circumstances are more different than ours. But looking at it, 50M PC gamers for a potential market, versus 300M mobile users for a potential market where for some reason, people are more compelled to spend money on a mobile game than a season pass or other items on a console.
To think gamer phones were laughed at as nothing but glorified high end phones (which they are) with more battery life, now it's becoming an accepted thing.
Kinda makes sense to see how many asian devs are on the mobile app store.
Mobile Diablo game itself is not a problem. It is because they chose Blizzcon out of all place to announce the game.
Diablo is a game which the most of hardcores resides on PC platform, and Blizzcon is where those hardcores attend. Did they really expect mobile version of Diablo would be well received there? lol.
i think the biggest problem I see people bringing up is that, its a reskin of an already existing game on the Chinese mobile app stores. They have comparison videos of the mechanics and buttons layouts and all.
In theory, mobile could be the future for gaming on an e-sports or tournament level: low system requirements compared to AAA titles. Modern flagship devices are extremely powerful, have dedicated GPU's, can support multiple peripherals via USB OTG or bluetooth, and can output to HDMI. So in theory you could connect a monitor, keyboard, mouse & speakers to a phone and run games as if on a PC.
App support for the input method would be required but theres no reason why LoL style tournament games couldnt run on your phone. Just dont expect AAA titles like BF5.
Anytime I play a mobile game I just think to myself how much easier it would be to play on PC. Not to mention having a larger screen.
Nothing hardcore, but I was browsing games on my Android and came across old school Runescape. I checked it out just for the heck of it, remembering playing it a bit when I was like 12 or 13. Man...I hated it. All I could think of was how much easier it would be with a mouse.
“We expect Activision Blizzard to outpace its peers with its in-game monetization, and expect dramatic growth in its mobile business as it launches new titles based upon its successful PC and console games.”
“Diablo Immortal could eventually have more than 200 million monthly active users, and that it could generate annual earnings of as much as $2.52 a share.”
There's nothing wrong with Blizzard making a mobile Diablo game. I'm sure they will have mobile games for all their IP's within the next year or two. I generally don't care for them except in cases like Hearthstone where it's well suited to the mobile platform, but I fully understand why they want to make them. It can be extremely profitable.
That said, they completely failed to understand what their fans/customers want at a convention like Blizzcon. You don't tease Diablo announcements in advance, and then unleash a mobile game as the only announcement for that IP and the biggest and most important announcement of the convention (in terms of positioning in panels, main stage, etc...). They were extremely naive to think this would play well to the sort of audience at Blizzcon, and their ignorant comments during the Q&A showed it.
As I said earlier, they could have avoided all this by simply giving a short Diablo 4 (or D2 remastered, or whatever) teaser at the same time. This is exactly what Bethesda did with Elder Scrolls 6 and their mobile game announcement, and they didn't get any of this backlash. A simple confirmation of one of those other Diablo PC projects in the form of a teaser with no gameplay or even ETA was all most of us were really expecting.
If it were to be a good full fledged game, why not, and even so i wouldn't see the point...The point of this game is to please shareholders. For all these years i have not been a smartphone user, not even touched one lol ! i just came to buy one, and it's a chore to play on this device. PC for life !
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