Yes I know, everyone's got a MacBook Air post up this week. Stage Manager this, M2 that, the new colors look nice, fine. I'll probably poke at Ventura once I've actually installed the beta on something I don't mind breaking. Today I want to talk about something dumber and, honestly, more infuriating: Diablo Immortal.
It came out June 2nd, free on mobile and PC, and within about 48 hours the discourse had fully curdled. Not because the game plays badly — by most accounts the core loop is actually decent, which almost makes this worse. It's because people started doing the math on what it would cost to fully upgrade a character's Legendary Gems, the endgame power system, and the numbers are absurd. I've seen estimates that fully optimizing just one character's gem setup would run well over $100,000 if you bought your way there instead of grinding for it. A hundred thousand dollars. For a phone game.
I want to be clear I'm not a mobile gamer, not really, my phone gaming diet is Wordle and the occasional round of Threes when I'm waiting for coffee. But I played a genuinely stupid number of hours of Diablo 2 in high school and put real time into Diablo 3 too, so this one hit close to home in a way that, say, a bad Candy Crush headline never would. And Diablo 3 is actually the relevant precedent here. Remember the real-money auction house? Launched in 2012, let you buy and sell items for actual cash, got so toxic for the game's economy and its design incentives that Blizzard killed it in 2014 and basically apologized for it. I wrote about that auction house on this very blog back when it launched, complaining that it turned loot drops into a slot machine. Ten years later they've built essentially the same slot machine again, just wrapped around a gacha gem system instead of an item market, and put it on your phone where it's even easier to tap "buy" at eleven at night when you're tired and your character just got walled by a difficulty spike.
The gem system itself is the part that's genuinely clever in a bad way. Legendary Gems drop from a gacha-style crest system, they have random quality when they drop, and you can "resonate" duplicate gems to slowly upgrade a copy toward five stars. Every layer of that sentence is a monetization lever. Crests cost money. Duplicates are what make resonance possible, so hoarding duplicates has value, so buying more pulls has value. It's the kind of system that reads like nobody in the room was allowed to say no to finance.
Metacritic's user score on this thing cratered almost immediately, sitting somewhere down around 0.5 out of 10 as of this week, which is review-bombing territory for sure but also just reflects a lot of very online, very burned Diablo fans venting in the only place that felt like it mattered. Belgium and the Netherlands aren't getting the game at all, because both countries have rules treating loot boxes as gambling, and Blizzard apparently decided compliance wasn't worth the redesign. That alone tells you something about how the system is built.
None of this is going to stop the game from making a ton of money. Free mobile games with predatory-adjacent economies almost always do, because the whales who spend real money are a tiny fraction of the player base and the rest of us are just there generating engagement numbers for free. I uninstalled it after two evenings, not because it was bad, but because I could feel exactly where the friction was designed to sit, and I didn't want to find out how I'd react to it after a rough day. Maybe that's overly precious of me. I just know I'd rather go replay Diablo 2 on my laptop, bugs and all, than hand a mobile game my credit card one crest at a time.
Anyway. Go install the Ventura beta if you're brave, I'll get to my own notes on it eventually. For now I'm just going to sit here mildly annoyed on Blizzard's behalf, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2022.