Case Study 2: Diablo Immortal — When a Beloved Franchise Embraced F2P Gacha
In November 2018, at BlizzCon, the company's annual fan convention, Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal — a new mobile entry in the Diablo franchise, developed in partnership with NetEase. The audience's response became one of the most memorable clips in gaming history: a fan asked, on a live microphone, "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" The lead developer's visible discomfort made the rounds for weeks.
The audience knew what it was seeing. A Diablo mobile game, built by a Chinese F2P specialist, announced at the fan convention where audiences expected a flagship Diablo IV reveal — this was not a creative decision. This was a business decision about the franchise. The audience's hostility was not about the mobile platform per se. It was about what mobile would mean for Diablo.
They were right. When Diablo Immortal launched on June 2, 2022, it was a slick, competently-designed action RPG with an advertised price tag of zero and a whale-math ceiling that made industry reporters spend weeks working out exactly how many hundreds of thousands of dollars it would take to max out a character. The number depended on your assumptions. The honest-math consensus was in the neighborhood of $100,000 to fully gear a top-tier character, with some analyses putting the true ceiling much higher.
This case study walks through how Diablo Immortal's economy worked, why it was controversial, and what its reception tells us about the ethics of F2P in premium franchises.
The Economy That Shipped
Diablo Immortal is genuinely free to play. You can download it, create a character, complete the campaign, and run many of its endgame systems without paying a cent. The game is not paywalled in the direct-exclusion sense. What it is — and this is the structural thing to understand — is end-game gated at the specific progression systems where competitive play lives.
The key system is Legendary Gems. Legendary Gems slot into a character's items and provide substantial power. They come in 1-star, 2-star, and 5-star varieties. Higher star Gems are dramatically more powerful. The top-tier 5-star Legendary Gems, maxed out, are the difference between a competitive character and an irrelevant one for the PvP-adjacent and high-level rift content.
Legendary Gems are acquired primarily through Elder Rifts — timed instance runs — that drop Legendary Crests. Crests are the key input to Gem acquisition. Here is where the economy turns.
Players can acquire Rare Crests (which yield 1-2 star Gems) through free play. Players cannot meaningfully acquire Legendary Crests (which yield the chance at 5-star Gems) without paying. Legendary Crests are sold in the cash shop. Completing Elder Rifts with Legendary Crests gives you Runes and a chance at a 5-star Legendary Gem — but the "chance" is in the single digits of percent.
To upgrade a 5-star Legendary Gem — and the upgrades are where the major power lies — you need duplicate Legendary Gems to combine. You need other 5-star Gems as fuel. The math is brutal:
- A 5-star Gem drops with roughly a 4.5% chance per Legendary Crest
- Upgrading a 5-star Gem from Rank 1 to Rank 10 requires dozens of other 5-star Gems as fuel
- A character wears multiple Gems simultaneously
- Multiple upgraded 5-star Gems across multiple items is the competitive build
Several analysts — including Bellular News, Quin69, and Kripparrian — ran the conversion. The math to fully max a character's Legendary Gems at launch was somewhere between $50,000 and $500,000 USD depending on drop luck, with the rough consensus at $100,000-$110,000. Wowhead's detailed analysis settled at approximately $540,000 to guarantee max-rank gems across a full build on the day of launch, later adjusted as systems changed.
These numbers, when first published, read as satire. They were not. They were the actual mechanical math of the systems as shipped. A Chinese streamer (YaoZeng) publicly spent over $100,000 USD equivalent on the game and demonstrated the resulting character against whale opponents who had spent comparable amounts. The whale economy was the point.
The Wilson Comment
On June 7, 2022 — five days after launch — Blizzard Senior Producer Jimmy Lu and Lead Designer Wyatt Cheng were interviewed by various outlets. The question being asked repeatedly was some version of: how do you respond to the critical reception of the monetization?
A tweet by Blizzard brand director Joe Shely, widely attributed in early reporting (sometimes misattributed to director Rod Fergusson), framed the company's response. Paraphrased from the broader set of Blizzard statements: the vast majority of players do not spend money; those who do have a choice; we are happy with the monetization; it works for both the player and the business.
The phrasing varied across sources, but the posture did not. Blizzard's public position was that the monetization was working as intended, that critics were a vocal minority, that the economy was fair because it was optional, and that the company was satisfied.
This was, charitably, a misreading of the moment. The critical response was not a vocal minority. The User Score on Metacritic at launch was among the lowest in the site's history — around 0.2 out of 10 — driven by tens of thousands of negative user reviews from players who had spent hours with the game and concluded that the competitive systems were unreachable without extreme spending.
The Wilson/Shely/leadership response doubled down rather than retreat. By contrast, EA had pulled the plug within a day of the Battlefront II launch (see Case Study 1). Blizzard decided to hold the line. The monetization stayed in. The game continued. The revenue continued — initial estimates were $24 million in the first two weeks**, rising to roughly **$300 million in the first six months, primarily from whales.
The Design Choice Behind the Math
The specific feature of Diablo Immortal's economy that made it controversial is worth naming precisely. It is not that the game is free-to-play; it is not that the game has microtransactions; it is not that the game has random rewards. All of those are defensible in the abstract.
The specific feature is gating competitive parity behind a monetization tier that is functionally unreachable through free play. A free-to-play player cannot, through any realistic amount of play, acquire the 5-star Legendary Gems in the quantities needed to compete with whale builds. The gap is not a grind gap; it is a structural gap. The free player is not in the same category of player as the paying player, and the game is designed so that the two populations exist on separate power curves.
This is the design choice. The mathematics is downstream of the design choice. The pity systems, the drop rates, the Rift timings — these are parameters that implement a design philosophy. The philosophy is that the end game is a whale playground and the free players are, functionally, the population against which the whales play.
The economic metaphor the industry uses for this is that free players are "content" for paying players. Free players populate the lobbies, get defeated by whale builds, create the social environment in which whaling makes sense. The whale is paying, in part, for the experience of having an audience — a population to be stronger than. Without the free population, the whale's spending is meaningless. The whale's spending, in turn, funds the development that makes the game playable for the free population. This is the economic circle F2P games are built around.
Diablo Immortal, more than most games, shipped this philosophy openly. The matchmaking system for PvP content made the gap visible. Free players who engaged with PvP modes would face paying players whose Gem-enhanced builds dominated the outcome. The mechanical incentive was to either pay up or exit the PvP content. The game would not let you pretend the economy was not what it was.
The Brand Cost
Blizzard made money on Diablo Immortal. By most reports, a lot of money — several hundred million in the first year. The company's public position is that the game was a financial success, and by the narrow metric of revenue, this is true.
It was not a success by other metrics.
User review scores. Metacritic user scores below 1.0 at launch, recovering slightly but never to competitive levels. Review sites and consumer-facing press characterized the game as exploitative rather than fun.
Franchise trust. Diablo IV — the premium successor — launched in June 2023 with visible overcorrection on monetization. The game was premium-priced, shipped with only cosmetic microtransactions, and executives in the run-up to launch spent significant interview time saying "we are not doing an Immortal." The company had to actively reassure the audience that the mainline game would not follow Immortal's model. That reassurance had a cost — the audience's default was no longer trust.
Developer reputation. Blizzard's reputation, already damaged by the 2021 harassment lawsuits (see the labor ethics section of the chapter), took further damage. Senior designers gave interviews distancing themselves from the monetization decisions. Former Blizzard employees working at other studios cited Immortal as part of the reason they left. The brand "Blizzard quality" had meant something for two decades; Immortal was one of several events in a multi-year period that eroded it.
Regulatory attention. While Diablo Immortal did not trigger the same regulatory cascade as Battlefront II, it was invoked in subsequent loot-box policy discussions. Netherlands and Belgium, already hostile to the broader category, did not allow Immortal's Legendary Crest economy in its original form; regional versions were modified.
Developer morale. Reports from inside Blizzard at the time suggested internal friction between the core design team (trying to deliver a good Diablo game) and the monetization-focused structure of the NetEase partnership. Several senior figures left in the 18 months following launch. Whether Immortal was the direct cause is impossible to say; it was at minimum a visible symptom.
What Made This Worse Than It Had to Be
Diablo Immortal could have shipped a different economy and still made money. This is the crux.
A cosmetic-only monetization model in the style of Genshin Impact's outfits, or a battle-pass-primary model in the style of Fortnite, would have generated meaningful revenue without creating a whale/free-player power chasm. The mobile ARPG audience is willing to pay for cosmetics. Blizzard's art direction is strong. A Diablo aesthetic line of premium cosmetics would have sold.
A generous pity system, in the style of Genshin Impact's 90-pull guarantee, would have bounded the worst-case spend and made the math less grotesque. The Immortal pity was weaker than Genshin's, and the multi-tier structure (Crest → Gem → Gem fuel → upgraded Gem) multiplied variance in a way pity did not mitigate.
A decoupling of PvP/competitive systems from paid gems would have preserved the whale economy in PvE (where the whale's power does not harm another player) while allowing PvP parity for free players. Path of Exile's approach — monetization in cosmetics and convenience, power from gameplay — has been sustainable for over a decade.
The Diablo team knew about these alternatives. Diablo's sister studios had worked on some of them. The choice was deliberate. The aggressive monetization was the business model the partnership with NetEase had been structured around, and the game's design followed the business model rather than constraining it.
This is the ethical pivot. The question is not "did Blizzard make a profitable game?" They did. The question is "did the design that maximized profit also maximize harm?" The answer is yes. And was there an alternative that traded some revenue for less harm? Yes, demonstrably, because other games are successfully doing the alternative.
Lessons for Designers
Diablo Immortal is a cautionary tale for the designer who will, at some point, be offered a similar assignment. "Bring our premium franchise to mobile with an F2P monetization model" is a pitch that will come across many desks in the coming decade, because it is how major publishers see the growth opportunity. Several specific lessons from Immortal:
A whale economy is a design choice, not a market fact. The math that makes a game require $100,000 to max out a character is the math you chose. You could have chosen different math. "The whales demand it" is not true; the economy *produces* the whale behavior by being designed to. You can design an economy in which the top spenders spend $500 a year and the game remains profitable. Many games do.
The "vocal minority" defense is rarely accurate and never protective. When Metacritic scores are 0.2, when every major review outlet is running negative coverage, when the game's subreddit is full of screenshots of spend receipts, the critics are not a vocal minority. They are the signal. Dismissing them is PR discipline; actually being correct about them is something else.
Franchise trust is an asset that cashes out slowly. The Diablo franchise had thirty years of player trust to draw on. Immortal drew on it. The subsequent Diablo IV had to spend considerable effort to restore it. The math on franchise trust is asymmetric: it takes decades to build and quarters to drain. Monetization decisions that trade long-term franchise trust for short-term revenue are usually bad trades even on pure business grounds.
Know what you are being paid to design. If the assignment is "design a game whose end-game is a whale extraction machine," you have the option to decline. Some designers will take the job and do the work. Some will refuse. The people at Blizzard and NetEase who built Immortal knew what they were building. The question is not whether they should have known; the question is what you will do when you are offered the same job.
Sometimes the best defense is to ship a better game at a different price point. The deepest rebuttal to Immortal is Path of Exile: a free-to-play ARPG with excellent monetization ethics, sustained over more than a decade, profitable, beloved. Grinding Gear Games has demonstrated that you can run a free-to-play ARPG without the whale-extraction model. The design work is harder; the revenue is smaller per player; the business is slower. It is also sustainable in ways Immortal's model is not.
The ultimate measure of Diablo Immortal is not the launch revenue. It is what it did to the game category — and to the designers who will, in the coming decade, have to decide whether to follow the same playbook. The playbook is legible now. The math is public. The player response is on record. Whoever ships the next Immortal-style game will do so with their eyes open, and the rest of us will read the reviews with ours open too.