It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal • Hacker News Board

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#491

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

cdash wrote: post #476

Aerroon wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation would create an incentive to region lock out the areas that regulate it. Now you have people from the regulating country use VPNs to play the game in another region instead.

Yeah sure, but say the EU as a whole or the US regulated it. You aren't region locking them out.

But you are though. Lots of games region lock US and EU out of their game.

Lost Ark is in the top 3 of all games played on Steam and has been since it released this February. The game was 3 years old when it launched in NA/EU though - it had been out for 3 years in South Korea, 2 years in Russia and Japan. This is a game that ended up being very popular, but if nobody had bought the NA/EU publishing rights then the only way to play it would've been to play on the Russian, Japanese or Korean servers.

It's pretty normal for online games that come from Asia to not cater to the western market. I don't see why they wouldn't do this even more if we get additional regulations on games. And even when they do cater to the western market the priority is going to be North America, not Europe. Europe's almost always second class in these. (And when these games are brought over they're often Americanized/localized.)

PS Lost Ark is banned in Netherlands and Belgium too.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#492

Post by Timshel » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #487

Isn't that a good thing? The fact that there is so much content that getting the best version of every item cannot happen, even if you spend some money? Is a game fair only if you can acquire the best gear in the game (for real money)?

Probably depends of your definition of content and tie with the discussion around Gacha game.

The part discussed here with the gem system looks more like a slot machine than anything I would describe as game content.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#493

Post by zmgsabst » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #487

Isn't that a good thing? The fact that there is so much content that getting the best version of every item cannot happen, even if you spend some money? Is a game fair only if you can acquire the best gear in the game (for real money)?

I think the problem is that having such a high peak implies you’ll have “pay to win” mechanics dominate:

Players will be stratified by how much of that $110,000 they can pay — with no reasonable way out of that class system.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#494

Post by teawrecks » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

encrux wrote: post #211

INGELRII wrote: post #195

Regulation proposal: Set maximum spending limit/time tied to the purchase price. The limit is tied to account and player character. example: 1. free-to-play: $100/year. 2. other: 10×purchase price/year. For a $50 game the maximum spending is $500 per year. This would not set hard limit. It would only mandate up-front investment related to the amount of in-game spending. A Whale who spends $10k a year would have to pa…

This would pretty much kill the current industry (*as we know it). F2P/mobile games are monetized through Wales, but they're only willing to spend if there's enough incentive (e.g. prestige). That's not given if there's no F2P player base, because the base game would be too expensive. IMHO the best way to go about is to vote with your wallet. There are plenty of worthwhile games where you don't have to be a whale to…

Why do you think Wales has so many wealthy mobile gamers in the first place?

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#495

Post by teawrecks » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

_abox wrote: post #485

encrux wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would pretty much kill the current industry (*as we know it). F2P/mobile games are monetized through Wales, but they're only willing to spend if there's enough incentive (e.g. prestige). That's not given if there's no F2P player base, because the base game would be too expensive. IMHO the best way to go about is to vote with your wallet. There are plenty of worthwhile games where you don't have to be a whale to…

Well good.. Let's kill it. Who cares if the business model works. It shouldn't work. The idea of such regulation is to stimulate the business to move back to normal models. In the Netherlands this is already working, Diablo immortal is not available there. It's a small market but once the whole EU does it they won't have a choice but to come up with something more reasonable. Win-win.

I'm not disagreeing, but the money will.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#496

Post by mattnewton » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

stevenjgarner wrote: post #483

mattnewton wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing? Yes. Look up “gacha games” [0] for the broader category. One very successful and very rich version of this genre is “genshin impact” > And can "winning" result in a financial reward In this case, no, not currently. People tend to structure competitive scenes around games without these mechanics but it could be done by the company devel…

For a programmer, are those gacha "vending machines" available in code libraries? I would love to experiment with implementing one in a productivity web application.

I am not sure I understand what you mean. The core mechanic is that rewards are randomly distributed - the namesake “gacha” machines dispense a capsule with a random toy. Think of it as a slot machine where if it hits you get an item you wanted / needed for gameplay and if it doesn’t it just took your money and gave you something useless.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#497

Post by margaretdouglas » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

lekevicius wrote: post #199

It's even more frustrating, because the game is good . I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases. It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds…

The issue is fundamentally that releasing a single game for a single fee yields linear growth, which is to say the amount your growing by is stagnant. Stagnant growth, to an investor, is essentially a signal that your company is currently failing. So unless you can grow your growth, you fail, and the only way to continue growing your growth is if new products remain cash generating indefinitely.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#498

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #436

Aerroon wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is saying that you can't play these games. The Dutch and Belgian government quite literally are saying that you can't though. Of course, in practice it just means Dutch and Belgian players will pretend they're from another European country via VPN. > Those gaming companies just have to accept that their products are a form of gambling and will be regulated and taxed as such. I'm not sure if you're saying thi…

I truly do not mean this as a flippant response to your comment, but there is a very simple solution to the problem you are envisioning coming from these regulations. Developers could just make a game with no micro transactions. The only way your ‘issues’ exist, is if these games are only made to make money via the gambling mechanics that are being regulated. Want your game available everywhere … just make a game tha…

I understand what you're saying, and I don't think it's a flippant answer at all, but that's only something the game developer can do. Ultimately, they're running a business and will make choices that make them money. If that means they don't publish their game at all in Europe or North America then that's what they're going to do. They won't be poorer for it, it'll be us, Europeans, who can't play their games (or we get to play some heavily Americanized version of the game, because that's the company that ends up publishing the game in Europe with lots of American changes).

My problem with this is that ultimately it ends up limiting my choices because I happen to live in Europe. I can choose not to play games that I think are trying to take too much advantage of me (or complain about ones that try to), but it's much more difficult to play a game that isn't permitted to be playable in my region.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#499

Post by hw » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

lekevicius wrote: post #199

It's even more frustrating, because the game is good . I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases. It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds…

> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".

Same can be said for software. Now it’s all SaaS where you have to pay monthly and choose from different pricing tiers or ala carte feature options to ‘win’ in a business sense.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#500

Post by friendlypeg » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #369

Honestly that's pretty cheap for a F2P game. The most financially successful F2P games will have planned for spend to 'go infinite'. This may be by setting up money fights on a ranked ladder, or constantly rotating out characters so that spenders have to reset progress. The fact that you can max out in Diablo Immortal, and so cheaply, shows Blizzard still hasn't learned what F2P is all about. They are listening too m…

They also have very tame monetization in their upcoming Warcraft mobile game when compared to the game it's cloning - Clash Royale. There are no loot boxes and you can buy character outright. Still the announcement was met with mixed reactions.

Maybe Blizzard's reputation has been so tarnished that even that is not enough and they need to forgo any mechanism that can be remotely considered giving paying customer advantages.

The thing is Activision has already successfully brought its flagship title Call of Duty to the mobile with only cosmetic store and making banks with it. So I disagree with you that Blizzard will be leaving money on the table by following that route.

It would be interested to see how well Diablo Immortal is going to do considering how much bad press it gets. Like you said the mobile gaming population is so much bigger than the PC one, but I question if the former are really immune to the opinions from YouTuber, social media and word of mouth from their friends.