Diablo Immortal: Game's director responds to microtransaction backlash

Diablo Immortal’s director has come out fighting amid the ongoing backlash to the game’s aggressive microtransaction strategy, as per Video Games Chronicle.

The Blizzard game has sparked a huge fan response since its release, with the majority of it being negative.

On Metacritic, Diablo Immortal has dropped to a user score of just 0.5 for the iOS version, and we reported previously that analysis has claimed that fully maxing out a character with real money can cost in excess of $110,000.

Months prior to the game being released, Wyatt Cheng, the director of the game, said: “In Diablo Immortal, there is no way to acquire or rank up gear using money”.

This has since been proved false, with Diablo Immortal players able to use real money as they look to acquire Legendary Gems. These are a progression tool alongside regular gear and XP level, and can be used to upgrade characters.

Players cannot buy Legendary Gems, though, as they are instead dropped from Legendary Crests, which are the game’s loot boxes.

On Twitter, over the weekend, Cheng was asked what had changed, with Zizaran, a popular Twitch streamer, asking if Gems were not considered as gear.

He also added: “The post you made come across and disingenuous (sic) and disappointing to people that have been fans of Blizzard for such a long time and it makes the matter a lotless important if you can’t ‘literally’ buy gear when you ‘basically’ can buy power anyway.”

Cheng responded: “That’s totally fair criticism and I can see how it came across that way. In context I was responding to a post that claimed ‘you can only upgrade your gear with $$$ once you reach the free quota of the day. It’s currently almost $12 to just simply even try to upgrade one piece of gear as the