Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra defends Diablo Immortal microtransactions

“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?”.

Many people are criticizing the microtransactions system that Blizzard have implemented in Diablo Immortal and now the company president Mike Ybarra gave his thoughts on the matter, defending the whole concept.

“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?’”

He then also explained how microtransactions affect the whole 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 on June 2nd, but it’s not available worldwide. The Netherlands and Belgium have banned the game’s release due to their laws around loot boxes while the Chinese release got delayed. While Blizzard stated that technical issues are the reason for the delay, many have speculated that something else was going on behind the curtains. Here’s the full statement from Blizzard on that matter:

“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 optimizations 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 optimizations, and more.”