Diablo Immortal has apparently earned over $24M in just two weeks

Diablo Immortal Monk
(Image credit: Blizzard/NetEase)

It's fair to say that Diablo Immortal hasn't been well-received by every corner of the internet. The action-RPG's microtransactions sparked a brutal backlash, its loot boxes prevented it from being released in Belgium and the Netherlands, and criticism of this free-to-play spin-off raised enough concern about the next mainline Diablo game that Blizzard had to promise Diablo 4 won't be monetized the same way.

None of that seems to have prevented Diablo Immortal from raking in the cash. As spotted by GameDev Reports, Diablo Immortal earned $24.3 million in its first two weeks and was downloaded over eight million times according to data sourced from Appmagic. And that's not even counting the PC version, which is currently in beta.

For the sake of comparison, Blizzard's other big earner on mobile is Hearthstone, which brought in just over $5 million in the last month.

On the subject of the game itself, Tyler Colp calls Diablo Immortal a game designed to exploit your love of Diablo, saying, "It's built around the dopamine that comes from whacking demon piñatas for loot, meticulously designed to give you a jolt of satisfaction every 30 seconds—and then, when that's not enough anymore, it charges you for it. For Diablo Immortal and games like it, the fun parts of games are money extraction devices."

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.