Asmongold reacts to Diablo Immortal player who spent $100,000

Asmongold, a popular Twitch content creator, has criticized Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal after a player who spent $100,000 on the game can no longer find a match in PVP.

It is not the first time Asmongold criticized the game (or the publisher), but he’s hardly the only one denouncing the egregious monetization of the supposedly F2P entry. Following its launch in June, Diablo Immortal has received a flood of criticism and complaints from players regarding its microtransaction-based monetization system, which is reflected in the game’s Metacritic user score.

YouTube content creator Jtisallbusiness released a video discussing the amount of money he spent on the game and his current problems. Players can purchase a variety of microtransactions to increase their in-game power, such as gems, legendary crests or the battle pass. Players who spend a lot of money on microtransactions are called “whales” in the mobile gaming community and make up the vast majority of the game’s revenue.

Since Diablo Immortal wants to keep PVP matches relatively balanced, the game only pairs players with power levels roughly equal to each other. This stops players from getting into unwinnable or boring matches due to a large power difference.

Jtisallbusiness has spent so much money on the game that there are extremely few players in his power bracket, leading him to wait an average of two hours in the queue. With him being essentially locked out of an entire game mode so early to the game’s launch, Jtisallbusiness has questioned if he should continue to play the game and whether or not he should get a refund. Asmongold then expressed his sympathies for the Youtuber as the player was punished for spending in the game rather than rewarded and joked that Jtisallbusiness is a whale that “can’t find food” since the game isn’t matching him up with anyone in PvP.

Due to the heavy monetization and ways to buy power in Diablo Immortal, free-to-play players will need a long time to even get close to Jtisallbusiness’s power level, meaning that there is no real end in sight to his problem.

The communities reaction to Jtisallbusiness and Asmongold’s video about him has been mixed. While some agree that Jtisallbusiness has been put in a bad spot due to the game’s system, others are celebrating the fact that Diablo Immortal will face more backlash, at least for weeks to come.

About Diablo Immortal

Diablo Immortal is a free-to-play, mobile action RPG developed by Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase. The game is part of the Diablo series, which have all been action RPGs and are known as dungeon crawler games. Players navigate a series of dungeons infested with monsters and can upgrade their character by increasing their skills and earning randomly generated equipment. The games are massively popular and have spawned many titles inspired by them, such as Path of Exile and Torchlight, becoming recognized as a sub-genre of the action RPG.

Diablo Immortal’s announcement in 2018 was met with immense backlash as the entry was supposed to be exclusively a mobile game when the rest of the series was initially released on the PC. This was later backtracked, as the game is also available on PC upon release, but the sentiment remains.

While the game’s combat, adaptation of Diablo mechanics, and graphics were praised, it was also criticized for its microtransactions, storytelling, and voice acting. Despite the criticisms, Diablo Immortal generated over $100,000,000 in revenue two months after launch and has over 30 million downloads as of July 29.