Diablo Immortal's pay to win mechanics encourage players

The biggest disappointment with Diablo Immortal stems not from the fact that it has so many microtransactions or even that it's pay-to win D2R ladder items. It's a sad truth that instead of using Diablo's mobile version to advance the game's mobile RPG market forward like Blizzard did with many genres through the years, instead, it decided to take on the worst practices of the platform. 

Diablo Immortal's pay to win mechanics encourage players to invest hundreds of dollars (or in the estimation of one player around $80. 000) to max out their character via Legendary Gems. Premium bundles of items in game start at as low as $1 and come with made-up "value" percents of around 800 percent to draw players into. As players progress and more bundles are released as they progress, the bundles begin go up in price. 

Three paid services are available to give players who are prepared to pay more and enjoy a bigger advantage over players who thought that they'd be successful by purchasing a battle pass. There's an entire progression system that is based on opening and opening more expensive loot box with keys which are opened with a special currency bought with a premium-priced currency. 

The list goes on. If you've got players who are pinging in the game's chatroom, hoping to join groups exclusively which include pay-to-win "whales" (a term used for players who invest huge amounts of money playing games that are free to play compared to the average player) it's a big problem. 

There's a lot of money to be made from the mobile game market with no cost to play and it's not hard to see why the strategy of Blizzard seems to be working. Diablo Immortal reportedly made upwards of $24 million over the first two weeks of its release, and that's with the game being restricted in two European countries cheap diablo 2 resurrected items, and then delayed for a while for China (the game will release in the other Asian markets on July 7).