Diablo 3 Enters China: Sale Details Revealed

Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase, Inc. announced that open beta testing for Blizzard Entertainment's award‐winning action role‐playing game Diablo III: Reaper of Souls has gone live in China On April 23, 2015. Approximately 3 million people signed up to play the beta in China, and the game has already sold 1 million units across two offerings: the Premium Package for approximately $32 (RMB198) and the Digital Deluxe Package for approximately $64 (RMB388). For those players, buying Diablo 3 items with discount prices from a reliable site is quite a wise choice!

Chinese players are able to access the base experience for free and can buy much of the content from Reaper of Souls via one of those two add-ons. In other regions, Diablo III was the #1 PC role-playing franchise in sales for the quarter, based on data from NPD and GfK Chart-Track.

Diablo III has been in development for the Chinese language and cultural requirements by NetEase, as announced last July. The Chinese version of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls entered open beta on April 23, 2015, and three million Chinese players signed up for it. In one week the pre-order sales exceeded 1 million copies, a new record for Chinese sales of a PC computer game. The Chinese edition of the game is unlike the game in other regions; it is free-to-play, with certain content available for purchase in two different packages.

Blizzard announced the real money features of the Diablo 3 Chinese version some months ago, doing it preemptively before (as they said) fans could datamine it and speculate that it was coming to all realms.

The devs have talked about the features since then, stressing that they didn’t want to make D3 a “pay to win” system, but that the features players could buy with platinum would be things like additional stash space, temporary +exp buffs, and various cosmetic options, and but not something like +100% DPS or anything directly game-affecting.

The Chinese Beta Test is now underway, and the official Chinese site D.163.com has a bunch of articles posted about the features and differences found in the Chinese version. These include full info on what sort of buffs and bonuses you can purchase with Platinum, and the ways you can obtain it (other than via credit card).

The pages are all in Chinese (which Google does not so great transating) and I haven’t heard back (yet) from our Chinese correspondent, so we’re not positive on all the specifics. The following links go to Chinese language pages, and are easiest to view in Chrome, which should prompt you to Google translate them automatically.

Chinese Region Differences
The basic issue with Chinese Diablo 3 is that most games in that region have a basic version that’s free to play, while most of the cool features are purchased via micro-transactions. This was heresy in gaming 10 or 15 years ago, but has since become the industry standard and I’ve seen players argue that it’s a superior system. The logic is that a game sold on a one-time purchase can be buggy or rushed or unfinished, since it only needs to look good once to get your money — while subscription or F2P games have to maintain content and support, and keep adding new features to keep players paying/playing.

Diablo 3 in China is going that route, and the basic game, equivalent to D3 vanilla, is free. To upgrade to Reaper of Souls and gain access to Adventure Mode and Rifts and the Crusader, etc, costs money. Other features are available for Platinum as micro-transactions, and these include include added stash space, cosmetic buffs like special pennants, and various temporary gameplay buffs such as +EXP, +Gold Find, +Blood Shard drop rate, etc.

For further news, please keep close here! We will keep monitoring all the information resources in order to provide you with the latest news and strategy guides! This site is the most coveted place for you to buy Diablo 3 items!