Three years in, Diablo Immortal has expanded the IP and is making Blizzard millions every month, just as planned.
The game had received a fiery reception both when it was first revealed at a fan event in 2018 and at launch in June 2022. Despite that, it has been pretty successful – Appmagic data suggests that after hitting peak monthly earnings of over $70m in August 2022, Diablo Immortal now earns Blizzard and NetEase $6-7m per month.
Speaking at The Game Business Live last week, Diablo Immortal’s executive producer Peiwen Yao and Blizzard’s senior director of mobile Shannon Williams talked through the journey the game has been on in the past three years.
First off, Williams stressed that the game is in no way a side project or spin-off. “Diablo Immortal is not an expansion, it’s a stand out and standalone product that has an enormous amount of investment and a fantastic player base,” she said. “So we take it very seriously – it’s not a brand extension.”
And Yao added that in expanding the IP out to mobile and new markets, Immortal has achieved what Blizzard had wanted from the outset. “It’s doing exactly what we had envisioned – more than half of our players are new to Blizzard and new to Diablo,” she said. “So that means Diablo Immortal is literally the first Diablo game they have ever played.”
Yao notes that the team is in ‘live service mode’ after shipping in 2022, and said that “the US and China are really core to the business”. It is seeing strong engagement in South Korea and Southeast Asia too.
Williams later explained that the type of person playing Immortal is “primarily a different audience” to the PC games. Diablo Immortal is playable across PC and mobile, leading to different play patterns on different platforms, explained Yao:
“When they want to enjoy dungeons, big maps, beautiful graphics, or play a long time with their friends, they choose to play on PC,” she explained. “When they want convenience, they want to play short session stuff, they go on mobile. Sometimes both, but that’s what we find to be the primary difference on platform choice.”
Addressing the rocky reception Immortal received when it was revealed at a fan event back in 2018, Williams said that it made the team more determined to deliver on the promise of the title. It also meant “leaning into” advocacy, working with creators and press, and “delivering an experience that is really undeniably Diablo and undeniably a quality experience.”
Yao also outlined some of the “common ground” between PC and mobile players, mainly Diablo lore and “the dungeon grinding experience”. But the mobile title offers something unique, too: “The biggest way we differentiate from the typical Diablo game is social elements,” Yao continued.
“Our players come back every day because their friends are there and they have an appointment they need to meet and they play either competitively or cooperatively. And we deliver so many features to meet their needs.”
Williams later said that publicly outlining the next full year of content with players has helped build player trust and retention. Yao said the idea of publishing public, year-long content roadmaps ’really freaked her out’ at first – but the release of the roadmap has now become one of the biggest moments of the year for the Immortal team.
“And the key is that all that content is free, so we are able to tell players: hey, these are the things you are playing for the year. We have delivered hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of content that’s all free.”
To keep making the game that the most ardent Immortal players want, Williams said that Blizzard conducts focus groups, surveys and keeps a close eye on the game’s forums. “And when a player is a little bit grumpy about something we put out, we put that on a list and we focus on fixing it,” she said.
Yao concluded by saying that the key to getting IP expansion into mobile right is in balancing the needs of the franchise’s core and new players. “That’s what the Immortal team has been constantly balancing and constantly working on,” she added. “You just have to make sure you still deliver the IP, what players love, and adapt to the platform accordingly.”
Williams rounded off the talk by predicting that at some point these platform differences will ‘fade into the background’.
“For a core audience especially, they’re looking for a flexible experience, something that’s uncompromising in quality, something that’s consistent, whether that be PC or console or mobile, they should be able to play all three, and they should be seamless,” Williams added.
“And so I feel like that is where the industry is going to go – the barriers between each of the platforms will fall.”
