The streamer Quin69 has been trying for days to obtain a 5/5 star gem in Diablo Immortal. He succeeded after investing over €15,000 into the game.
The situation in brief:
- Diablo Immortal has been criticized since its release for its strong monetization system, which many players describe as exploitative and Pay2Win.
- This led to the game being bombarded with negative reviews on the review platform Metacritic, making it the lowest-rated game there.
- Twitch streamer Quin69 is primarily known for his streams of Path of Exile, but he is also involved in all forms of Diablo, currently mainly in Diablo Immortal.
- He has set out to obtain a 5/5 star gem, no matter the cost.
About two weeks after the release, he found out exactly what it costs.
“Thank you for this authentic Diablo experience”
This is what Quin69 says: In a self-experiment, Quin69 set out to show how much of a scam Diablo Immortal is. His goal was to obtain a 5/5 star gem. They are among the most powerful items in the game and correspondingly rare.
Quin69 has therefore decided to keep spending money on the €15 Rifts until he receives his desired item. This cost the streamer over 25,000 New Zealand dollars, which is approximately €15,121.57.
On Twitter, Quin sarcastically celebrated his “victory” with the comment, “Thank you, Blizzard and Diablo Immortal, for this authentic Diablo experience.”
In the podcast Allcraft by streamer Asmongold, he also discussed Diablo Immortal and commented on the game as follows:
The game was in development for 4 years, right? It’s a reskin of an already existing game and they packed in the identical algorithm that generates the Rifts. That should have taken a few months. I’m not a developer, but that’s just laziness.
It’s a mobile game with the same code and the same assets as Diablo 3. And I wonder: What did they spend 4 years on?
Quin believes that the developers invested more time in the concept and implementation of the monetization of Diablo Immortal than in the game itself.
Big success despite criticism
This is how Diablo Immortal is doing financially: Despite receiving criticism and bad reviews from all sides, Diablo Immortal seems to be doing very well financially. Within the first week after release, it made over $10 million in revenue.
This number has since more than doubled. A whopping $24 million in revenue has been reported by the tracking site AppMagic. Within the first two weeks after launch, Diablo Immortal also recorded over 5 million downloads. China does not seem to be included in the numbers yet.
What is your opinion on the monetization of Diablo Immortal? Have you spent any money, are you playing it Free2Play, or are you completely staying away from it? Let us know in the comments.
Blizzard developers have assured, in light of the criticism, that the funding model of Diablo 4, which is highly anticipated by many, is different from that of Immortal:
Blizzard employees emphasize: Diablo 4 will not be monetized like Immortal
