Diablo Immortal Earnings Are Colossal, Over Million Dollars a Day
To no one’s surprise, Diablo Immortal extracted $49 million from players in the first month. This puts the Diablo Immortal earnings at over $1 million per day. To drive that point home, the actual number is around:
- $1.6 million per day
- $68k per hour
- $1.1k per minute
- $18 per second
Mobilegamer.biz reported this data from AppMagic earlier this week about the controversial free-to-play hack-and-slash RPG. Based on the data from AppMagic, Diablo Immortal achieved almost 7 million downloads in the first week. And a little over 10 million times by the end of the first month.
In terms of daily revenue, the data from AppMagic suggests Diablo Immortal earnings peaked ten days after launch at around $2.4 million. Over the last month, the only day that saw earnings at less than $1 million was launch day.
And these values only reflect the mobile version of Diablo Immortal. They do not include earnings from the PC version. AND these numbers only include what Blizzard took in AFTER Apple and Google took their cuts.
All of that is to say, $49 million is conservative when it comes to understanding how much money Blizzard has extracted from its player base.
Diablo Immortal Earnings vs Criticism
Content creators, players, and news outlets criticized Diablo Immortal for predatory monetization systems. These systems use a variety of psychological techniques to lure players into spending a trivial amount of money at the beginning to ease players into opening their wallets. Then as the player progresses through the game, the options to spend money become more and more pervasive. By the time players reach the late game and engage in PVP, the game nudges you to spend money at every turn.
Shortly after release, Diablo Immortal obtained the lowest ever user score on Metacritic. The criticism doesn’t end for this game and Blizzard has been more or less silent. The game’s director, Wyatt Cheng, tried to push back on the wave of criticism in the beginning. But he too went radio silent after the first week.
The “problem” is that this is a mobile game and people who play mobile games are generally not in the business of reading gaming news. They just want to play something to kill some time, to get that dopamine hit. So it doesn’t matter how much people criticize the game because Blizzard is raking in so much money from the players who couldn’t care less about how predatory it is.
The next big question then is how many of these predatory systems will find their way into the next Diablo game. In the aftermath of the Diablo Immortal release, Diablo IV devs repeatedly told fans on Twitter that microtransactions in D4 will be cosmetic only. We can hope that’s true, but hope is not a strategy for effecting change.
And after these crazy Diablo Immortal earnings, why wouldn’t execs at Activision Blizzard push for it in Diablo IV?
