On Wednesday, June 15th, the official Weibo social media account for Diablo Immortal was banned. The account, which had almost 46,000 followers was "forbidden from posting" due to "violation of related laws and regulations." This news was first shared by the South China Morning Post late last week.
Over the weekend, Blizzard put up a new press release on their Chinese website that announced a delay of Diablo Immortal's release in China. Blizzard's official reason for the delay says that it is to make "several optimizations to the game." Blizzard says they are aiming for "wider device support" along with improving models, optimizing network and performance, and more.
Diablo Immortal, which was supposed to be out on June 23, now has no firm release date in China.
The ban from Weibo allegedly happened after the official Diablo Immortal account posted a reference to Winnie the Pooh. As we all know, that's a big no-no in China due to the thin skinned, Winnie the Pooh looking, and censorship loving Xi Jinping.
Stock value of NetEase fell a pretty noticeable 10% in the morning following the delay announcement. NetEase was a co-developer on Diablo Immortal.
All of this comes just as word spread that Diablo Immortal has already pulled in $24 million through microtransactions. While it's obvious that $24 million over two weeks is a lot, it still doesn't hold a candle to most popular mobile titles out there. Just to compare, Honor of Kings made $268 million in May 2022. PUBG Mobile made $206 million in May. Even if we estimate that Diablo Immortal pulls in $50 million over the course of a month, that's still extremely low in the mobile market.
Diablo Immortal is also sitting at a 0.3 user score at Metacritic. This ties it with the PS4 version of Madden NFL 21 as the worst reviewed game by users on Metacritic.
