Diablo Immortal won't release in the Netherlands and Belgium due to loot box law

Being presented with a rule and declining to do the thing that would require you to follow the rule is the opposite of malicious compliance.

Malicious compliance is when you do the thing,and follow the rule but for the purpose of inflicting unanticipated damage on the entity that is compelling you to follow the rule.

Imagine a situation where a parent tells their child that they must spend 60 minutes cleaning their room or they won't get ice cream. A child who says 'Yeah, no, I don't want ice cream that bad" isn't being maliciously compliant, while a child who says 'Yeah sure thing mom, 60 minutes of cleaning" while they spend that time doing cleaning their room as slowly as possible is malicious compliance.

It pushes away new players with difficult instead of convincing them to play.

Maybe the pshchologists hired by the company that makes the game made a psychological profile of whales - and this allows good conversion. However they also wfite thwt they dont use data for decisions (just vibes) so it is not clear.

They seem to be lucky with no real competition apart from maybe Diablo3.

I think free to play is fine when they employ less predatory practices, like for example league of legends. Some spent a lot of money in that game, so it works as a business strategy, but it wasn't designed to trigger sick people into a spiral where they spend more and more money. You buy a thing, now you have the thing, you don't pay money to pass artificial barriers or hoping to get the thing you want in a lottery. Paying money to pass a barrier just to get to another barrier you need to pay money to pass is also predatory in my opinion, not just the random lootboxes.

I mean D1 & D2 are not even comparable to Immortal. It might feel like the same franchise, but Immortal is basically like going to Las Vegas and playing a Diablo slot machine. D1 & D2 were self-consistent worlds, where the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty. This is rendered completely meaningless the second you can buy items with money. Yes, this was still a problem back then, but the solution should have been removal of the store and trading, instead of making the store and market in-house.

Not just Blizzard, but also a large part of the game industry, have sneaked in a different product... from selling an experience, to selling tokens and items in their store.

I wouldn't care that much if they had created a new franchise, and named it something different (honestly this includes D3). However, it's the blatant disregard for games as an art form, transforming them into software services with stores. They will still make money, but it's not because they made a video game, but rather a fancy slot machine.