Diablo Immortal has been delayed in China days after the official Weibo account was banned from posting

Diablo Immortal won’t launch this week in China, and the official Chinese social media account on Weibo has been banned from posting.

Diablo Immortal, Activision Blizzard’s latest release and all around controversy-maker, has been indefinitely delayed in China just a few days before its planned release on June 23. This comes just days after the official account for the game was banned on China’s Weibo platform, one of the country’s largest social media sites.

The official announcement of the delay can be seen here. Via machine translation, the team apologises for the delay and says they are making “a number of optimisation adjustments” including supporting more devices, making the game look nice, and various smaller tweaks. There is no mention of when the release is now likely to be. We would assume it’s still in the near future rather than months away.

Publisher Netease’s share price dropped sharply in response to the news, bottoming out at 136 Hong Kong Dollars and recovering slightly to 141, an 11% drop from recent highs of 155 or so. It’s part of a recent downward trend in a volatile June for the company, which was boasting highs above 170 this year and 206 in 2021.

On the Weibo side, the official Diablo Immortal page was banned “for violating relevant laws and regulations” on Wednesday last week, and is still unable to post. This is similar to a game having its Twitter account, Facebook page, or Discord server removed in the days leading up to release. While the account has ‘only’ 47,000 followers, it’s a significant loss. An explanation has not been forthcoming.

As explained by the South China Morning Post, there are much harsher punishments that Weibo can dole out, such as total page removal. Still, not something you’d expect, particularly for a game clearly designed for the Chinese market – indeed, it’s one of the only times Blizzard has worked with an outside development studio, in this case Netease, to develop something.

According to investigations by Reddit users, most notably here, the entire fiasco may be down to a rogue employee posting anti-government messaging on the Weibo page that read “Why hasn’t the bear stepped down?” - a reference to President Xi Jinping that is often censored. This led to the removal of all posts mentioning the release date and eventually this announcement and the posting ban. We’ve reached out to Blizzard for comment.

While controversy has reigned since its release, Diablo Immortal has made an obscene amount of money during its release window, as reported by Pocket Gamer. It has had more than 8 million downloads and $24 million USD in revenues generated, with 43% of that coming from the US and 31% combined from Japan and South Korea.

If you’re playing, check out our Diablo Immortal best starter class article.

Written by GLHF.