I'm glad I don't have time to play video games. The industry is getting worse and worse every year. (I thought my WoW addiction back in the day was bad - but at least the spending was capped at 13 Eur/month).
It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
111–120 of 769 posts
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#112I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.
Rich people are rich because they do not spend $10K on a digital downloads that have no actual value...
The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#113Why is that considered a lot? People pay more for e.g sports memorabilia
Those sports memorabilia are at least traded on a market, and thus hold and retain that "investment". Not that sports memorabilia make much sense to me either, but at least you get something of proven value.
Proven value might be stretch, but at least theoretical chance to finding bigger fool. And thus recouping some of the cost.
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#114I regularly play games with gambling (gacha) mechanics and I love them. The short bursts of fun are exactly what I'm looking for in my current busy life. I have nothing against this model of monetization. Gambling is fun. Casinos are fun. I am not a big spender by any means, but I've probably spent ~$2k on these kind of games over the past two years or so. I don't regret it, and for me the fun is in figuring out how…
With $100 a month you can do a lot of things. (And I'm not even talking about the regions of the world where you could survive a month with that amount). Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!
But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.
Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.
Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.
The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple/Google revenue will see a big decline if those games are regulated. Most if not all the top grossing games on mobile follow the same spending pattern, and a big chunk of app stores' revenue come from those games.
And that's exactly the reason almost all mobile game are utter trash. Of course that was caused because the app-"economy" was broken from day one on: You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those. So you have to make the software "free" and sell your user's data, or charge one or two bucks and use some other immoral scheme to get your actual costs…
> You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those.
I'm not sure if that is strictly true. Prices did vary a lot in the beginning. However scale created a race-to-the-bottom situation for the exact reason you cited: most people wanted to pay less. The market was flooded with apps and games at the minimum price which created a strong expectation among the bulk of buyers.
Consumable IAP is what really enabled the gambling-like mechanics. That was discovered not long after the implementation of IAP and very quickly the game devs that converted to free + consumable IAP started making all the money. IIRC it was an open secret in mobile games many many years ago that the optimal strategy was to make the early game easy to cast a wide net, then slowly ramp up the pay-to-win mechanics to milk the whales as much as possible. You don't really care if everyone else quits - so long as most people get X% of the way through before they do. Then you tweak X% to optimize for catching the most whales.
The super critical aspect is the deliberate ramp. You have to get as many people into the early part of the funnel as possible so some of them will become invested enough to become whales. This also means you absolutely must make the game miserable for 90% of your players but only after they've made a significant investment.
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors love the monetization model and they get to decide what is just right and moral in our system of economics. The “fiduciary duty” to investors means sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves. If you can make money, you MUST make it. Someday I hope we find some way as a society to give value to other things. Its not really working out.
> sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves. It would be great if we could stop spreading this misunderstanding. Fiduciary duty is a duty not to deliberately destroy shareholder value. Basically you can't set it on fire or loot it. It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders. Leaders are free morally…
> It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders.
This. Otherwise Apple and Disney would be forced to sell porn. But they don't because of their moral (one could argue prude) stance which makes less money for the investor.
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#117Sometimes I see ads for mobile games and I get curious about them. Then I go to youtube and watch the playthrough videos and realize just how much of my life and money I could waste on what turns out to be 100s of hours of mostly random button mashing. The Kim Kardashian video game playthrough is a good one if you really want to dig deep into the depths of consumerist nihilism[1].
Anyway, doing the playthrough, or watching a video game speed run is enough to spoil the whole game for me and make me not want to play it. Problem solved. Also, there's all the free to play retrogames out there which are great if you just have endless amounts of free time. I guess I just don't get gambling, especially when you can't actually win money.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhizrsqMV8A&list=PL9aL0Ok5ss...
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s your choice whether to install them or not. Let’s stop treating people like children please.
True, why have drug restrictions anyway... Or many other things. Let adults be adults and have whatever they want.
Yes, but then we should stop socializing the costs of their actions.
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves. Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
Because a normal hobby is not designed to be addictive. A hobby like wood working doesn't push you to do woodworking every day and there are not people behind this non existing mechanism who design it like it. Also normally a hobby costs money due to physical parts of that hobby. A software engineer as a hobby only needs some computer, would worker needs a metal saw.
Fitness hobbies also punish you for taking some time off. But they still just happen to be that way, instead of being deliberately designed, and that's a distinction that should very much be allowed to make a difference. It's not unusual at all for intent to carry legal significance.
Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
#120I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.
> they're just people with an addiction Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself. Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups…
Same for me. 2015 or so. FarmVille addiction. Once I clicked 1200 times straight to farm/plaugh/seed, my fingers heart. So searched for a solution and found click recorders . Not exactly cheat but once I started using the auto click, I was out of addiction within a month and left game in Two month.