Diablo Immortal, the hack-and-slash action role-playing game, is Activision Blizzard Entertainments' game that has been making headlines on the internet for many reasons.
Having launched ahead of schedule, Diablo Immortal is among the most anticipated games on 2022. The game is also the first Diablo installment that focuses on mobile devices in the massively multiplayer online action role-playing game genre.
Blizzard has claimed that Diablo Immortal is the "biggest launch in franchise history."
But what makes the game continuously in the headlines, is because of its sneaky microtransaction business model.
By using the free-to-play game approach, Blizzard Entertainment is able to deliver the Diablo experience gamers have longed for, while also generating significant amount of income, that many gamers are apparently hating.
And this time, Diablo Immortal has gained the reputation for having the worst Metacritic user score in the website’s history.
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books.
Created in 1999, Metacritic creates scores from each review by creating a weighted average.
As the largest aggregator for reviews, Metacritic is regarded as the foremost online review aggregation website for the video game industry.
And Diablo Immortal has a user score of 0.2 out of 10, based on thousands of user ratings.
The cause of this massive low score, is the negative reception of its microtransactions.
According to many gamers and online reviewers who made arguments about Diablo Immortal's business model, it would take roughly 10 years of playtime for a F2P player to fully kit out a character in the game's "free" iteration. But even when someone does that, F2P players cannot become the strongest or the most powerful without earning top-rated Legendary Games, which are only available via some of the game's monetization options.
Legendary Gems are one of the characters' three progression pillars alongside their regular gears and experience level. Legendary Gens dictate one's endgame-tier progression beyond what is possible simply by reaching Diablo Immortal's level cap.
By using Legendary Gems, players can deliberately buy their way to the top.
And that can cost players upward to more than $100,000.
Blizzard‘s previous lowest-rated game was its 2021 re-release of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, which received a 0.5 score for adding microtransactions and a much-criticized faction system.
Read: The Sneaky 'Diablo Immortal' Microtransactions That Annoy Many Online Gamers
But regardless of the reviews and whatever everyone else said, Diablo Immortal is still making more than $1 million a day, after a month being launched.
According to data from AppMagic, the mobile entry in the Diablo franchise has sustained a steady stream of revenue, despite ongoing criticism from fans of the series.
Diablo Immortal was released on June 2 on iOS and Android, and as an open beta on PC.
Revenue from the title peaked just over a week after launch, with Blizzard Entertainment earning $2.4 million.
After over a month after release and barrages of negative public sentiment surrounding the game, Diablo Immortal is still earning strong.
Shortly after launch, the game’s director Wyatt Cheng claimed on Twitter that the backlash to the game was "based on misinformation surrounding it."
It should be noted that Metacritic user scores do not require proof that the user has played the game before submitting a score. There are other factors too that can contribute to the low score, including the controversies Activision Blizzard had in the past.