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Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has defended the microtransactions in Diablo Immortal, which many people have criticised as being too insistent.
Speaking in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Ybarra said:
“When we think about monetization, at the very highest level it was, ‘How do we give a free Diablo experience to hundreds of millions of people, where they can literally do 99.5% of everything in the game?’”
Ybarra then went on to explain how monetisation affects development:
“The monetization comes in at the end game. The philosophy was always to lead with great gameplay and make sure that hundreds of millions of people can go through the whole campaign without any costs. From that standpoint, I feel really good about it as an introduction to Diablo.”
Diablo Immortal came out last month, on June 2nd. Except that it didn’t come out everywhere. Belgium and the Netherlands banned the game’s release, due to their laws around loot boxes. And Blizzard had to delay the game’s Chinese release. Blizzard cited technical issues, though many speculated that it could be down to legal issues. The statement from Blizzard was as follows:
“We are sorry to inform you that Diablo: Immortal’s scheduled launch on June 23rd will be delayed. The development team is working on a number of optimisations to the game—greater device support for a wider range of models, maximum graphics quality on more models, a number of experience, network and performance optimisations and more.”
