Blizzard may host BlizzCon live in 2023

Mark Ibarra recently gave an interview for the Los Angeles Times, in which he spoke about the monetization of Diablo Immortal, holding the next BlizzCon and other points.

According to Ibara, the company plans to hold BlizzCon in a live format next year. Blizzard is rethinking the event in order to allow it to take place. He said this as follows:

We previously announced that we are taking a break from BlizzCon while we rethink it in the future, but want to return to a live event that allows us to celebrate the community. We recently hired a new BlizzCon Leader, April McKee, who is hard at work on this plan. We are committed to bringing BlizzCon back in 2023.

Not so long ago it became known about the cancellation of BlizzCon 2022 due to a lawsuit filed by the DFEH (California Department of Fair Employment and Housing).

Mark also talked about the monetization of Diablo Immortal. In his opinion, the rating, which became the lowest in the history of video games, was received very undeservedly, since it is aimed at end-game content, that is, the one that begins after the end of the story campaign, and does not apply to most e-sportsmen.

According to Ibarra, if the company had the goal of monetization in the first place, then players would be forced to donate to end-game content through the creation of irresistible grindwalls and other things.

Mark reports that Blizzard wanted to provide 99.5% of the content to the players without the need for an infusion of money. Most of the players did just that and consumed the content, avoiding the donation component:

When talking about monetization, we thought, “How can we give hundreds of millions of players a free experience in Diablo Immortal”?

Monetization starts only in the endgame. The company's philosophy was to offer players great gameplay and make sure that hundreds of millions of people can play through the story campaign at no cost. From this point of view, I feel good about Diablo Immortal, which introduces people to the franchise.

After the release of Diablo Immortal, the game caused a lot of hype due to the amount of money that needs to be poured in to maximize the leveling of the character. According to various bloggers, you can become a top player by spending about $115,000 on Immortal. One of the guests of the reddit forum shared his research. According to him, for the maximum result , you need to donate more than $540,000 into the game. Analytical portal Appmagic, in turn, carried out calculations and reported the approximate amount of Blizzard's profit from the new Diablo in the first month after the release. The amount of funds earned has almost reached the mark of $50,000,000.

Diablo Immortal was released on June 2 on PC and mobile devices running Android and iOS. On the main rating aggregator Metacritic, the computer version of the game received a record low score of 0.3 points out of 10, and the mobile version received 0.4 points out of 10. The previous anti-record also belonged to Blizzard. Gamers didn't like the remastered version of Warcraft III.

Blizzard has announced that there will be no such monetization in Diablo IV.