Cash grab will always be superior especially when you factor in the effort making the game. MMOs will be magnitudes harder than making mobile cash grab games.
I honestly thought it was inevitable for Blizzard to go down this route the moment I saw the revenue slides post acquisition. In that slide it showed that King’s mobile games made way more than Blizzards games. At that point, all the MBA suits in the board must have started thinking, “why go through all the hoops of making a good game when you could spend way less money and effort to milk the cash cows?”
Thus the pressure started mounting up on Blizzard to create more “efficient” games like Hearthstone and newer releases instead spending long time creating and refining a game like they have before.
Precisely this, I feel like the only middle-ground here is not to sell your company to corporate overlords, we learned that lesson with many other companies.
Simon Sinek has a really good point in his book "Start With Why" that basically says selling your company is a complete failure, because you basically lose your autonomy and ability to adapt to unique market conditions that let companies be successful in the first place.
If you sell your company, presumably you don't care about its future success anymore and now you have a bunch of money with which you can do whatever you want.
Lost Ark and Genshin manage to be both very cash grab and very reasonable as a free-2-play. You can spend a lot of money on both, and pay-2-win in both, but still get to experience the whole game at a reasonable pace as a f2p player.
Diablo Immortal seems to do many of the same things, but just in a much more egregious way. So far I've heard a lot about how much money you can spend on the game, but not much about how bad it makes the f2p player's experience.
In Lost Ark and Genshin most players don't care that much about whales spending 10k to deal 100% extra damage because it's purely player-vs-environment and that sort of damage boost is totally excessive and unnecessary.
But many games make progress feel extremely slow or otherwise aggravating to push purchases.
I haven't really heard much about where Diablo Immortal lies on that scale.
As an anecdote, in Genshin F2P is totally adequate — its key feature is that max character level is constrained and easily achievable, so the main difficulty becomes getting new rare characters, especially if you’re impatient.
I honestly thought it was inevitable for Blizzard to go down this route the moment I saw the revenue slides post acquisition. In that slide it showed that King’s mobile games made way more than Blizzards games. At that point, all the MBA suits in the board must have started thinking, “why go through all the hoops of making a good game when you could spend way less money and effort to milk the cash cows?”
Thus the pressure started mounting up on Blizzard to create more “efficient” games like Hearthstone and newer releases instead spending long time creating and refining a game like they have before.