Diablo Immortal surprise-launches early on mobile

By Jesse Lennox June 1, 2022

Diablo Immortal has appeared on U.S. mobile storefronts ahead of the planned June 2 launch date.

Despite Activision Blizzard formally announcing the release date for Diablo Immortal as June 2, and even tweeting out a map of global release times, the game has already begun showing up to download in the U.S. This is only true for the mobile version of the game, and it currently only seems to be available in this one region so far.

After the surprise launch was discovered, Blizzard confirmed that this was intentional and that the PC version would launch, as previously planned, on June 2.

The release times tweet did state that players “may see it populate on servers even sooner,” however gave no indication that it could be a full day earlier than expected. A pinned comment on the Diablo Immortal official Discord server, on the other hand, did imply this would be the case. The comment, posted on May 28, states that “As we note in our blog iOS and Android players will start to see Diablo Immortal propagate on their respective stores on the morning of 6/1. We don’t exactly know who will see it first or in what order of those who will see it. We expect this to be fairly early in the morning that this process will start (Pacific Time).”

It isn’t often that game releases are pushed forward, even if it is only by just a day, so this is a welcome surprise for anyone looking forward to giving Diablo Immortal a shot. While this currently only applies to players in the U.S, we anticipate other regions will start seeing it appear over the course of the day as well, except for the Netherlands and Belgium where the game will not launch due to their laws against lootboxes.

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Mobile

This $450 Android phone handles Diablo Immortal far better than you’d expect

Diablo Immortal on the Samsung Galaxy A53.

The $450 Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is one of our top recommendations if you want a reliable, attractive, and capable everyday smartphone at a reasonable price. But it's not a flagship device with the best processor or a dedicated gaming phone with extra buttons and a massive screen. So how does it cope with Diablo Immortal, one of the biggest mobile game releases of the year? That's what we wanted to find out.
The power within
We've played Diablo Immortal on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, the iPhone 13 Pro, and the Asus ROG Phone 5 — just to name a few. But all these have fast, powerful processors inside, so it's no surprise the game plays very well. The Galaxy A53 5G has Samsung's more modest Exynos 1280 for power and either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. The 5nm octa-core chip uses two ARM Cortex A78 cores and six ARM Cortex A55 cores, plus the Mali G68 GPU, which Samsung says is designed for great graphics and low energy consumption.

The screen is a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED one with a 120Hz refresh rate, a 2400 x 1080 pixel resolution, and an 800 nits peak brightness. It's covered in flat glass, and the 8.1mm thick, 189-gram plastic chassis means the phone doesn't feel too light or difficult to grip. Diablo Immortal is a massive install and takes up 9.12GB of space in its entirety — a large chunk of the A53's 128GB of internal storage. It's a good thing the Galaxy A53 has a MicroSD card slot because, with Diablo Immortal installed, you may end up needing it.

Computing

I tried playing Diablo Immortal on PC, and it was a mistake

Diablo Immortal on a PC monitor.

Diablo Immortal, Blizzard's new mobile-first action RPG, is abysmal on PC. The game launched in open beta at the beginning of June for PC and mobile, and I downloaded the PC version to see what all the fuss (and discourse) was about. But I couldn't stomach the experience for very long.

Although there are hundreds of fantastic mobile games, I prefer to do my gaming at a desk on my PC. Diablo Immortal had a big opportunity to win over the core PC fan base that infamously trashed the game, but the busted PC port shows that Blizzard's effort was half-hearted at best.
Built for mobile

Mobile

We played Diablo Immortal on the Galaxy S22 Ultra and Steam Deck — and one was a mess

The Steam Deck running Battle Net launcher and the S22 Ultra running Diablo Immortal.

This wasn’t supposed to be a difficult story to write. In theory, all I had to do was play Diablo Immortal on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and on the Steam Deck and compare the experience on the devices. However, because of the many frustrating aspects of Blizzard's launcher — and the conflicts I experienced with it and the Steam Deck’s hardware and software — I ended up sinking a huge amount of time into troubleshooting rather than playing. In fact, I could probably have beaten the main Diablo Immortal story on the S22 Ultra in the time it took to troubleshoot the game launcher on the Steam Deck.
Setup process: Simple on S22 UItra; nearly impossible on Steam Deck
Getting started with Diablo Immortal on the Galaxy S22 is a piece of cake. I opened the Google Play Store, downloaded the game, and that's all there was to it. On the Steam Deck, it was a completely different story.

The problem is that the PC version of Diablo Immortal isn’t on Steam, and is designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse. In order to install it, you’ve got to go through desktop mode on the Steam Deck and install the Battle.net launcher using Proton compatibility software — and only then can you download the game through the Battle.net launcher. However, once I installed the launcher, I encountered a bug with Battle.net that prevented me from downloading Diablo Immortal.