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

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

#581

Post by wetpaws » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

iaaan wrote: post #580

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…

I feel like we're well past due for some kind of price hike on AAA video games. Games were $60 when I was a kid, and inexplicably, they still are, for the most part. Unfortunately, since investors have figured out that the subscription model extracts the most profit possible, I have a feeling we're going to be seeing more and more of that rather than a simple price increase. Wouldn't surprise me if we even see Steam…

People keep saying games should cost more, and yet games routinely gross orders of magnitude more than in the past due to sugnificantly expanded market.

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

#582

Post by geraldwhen » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

cehrlich wrote: post #549

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely, Nintendo tried a sane sales model with Super Mario Run back in 2016. You would have access to some levels, then pay and unlock the rest. No more in-app purchases, IIRC. The reaction was a lot of angry comments about the game being locked and that it should be free-to-play, etc. Their next games (like Mario Kart Tour) went back to the exploitative loot box model.

Mario Run was also just not a very good game (this is obviously an opinion, but still…). I wonder how it would go if Nintendo tried releasing an actual good game for $10 or some other amount, not an infinite runner with a Mario skin.

It wasn’t an infinite runner. It was puzzle levels with blocks you stopped on and timed jumps.

Anyone who describes Mario run as an “infinite runner” didn’t play it.

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

#583

Post by wbobeirne » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #579

I know this is a crazy thought and not inline with a lot of the blizzard hate - but why don't games like this allow more gifting style mechanics? I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity. I rem…

You end up with a huge security incentives problem. If there's a way to extract the value from one account and give it to another, you massively increase the incentive to phish users, set up black markets for buying items off of a hacked account, or just transfer it to your own.

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

#584

Post by snek_case » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #579

I know this is a crazy thought and not inline with a lot of the blizzard hate - but why don't games like this allow more gifting style mechanics? I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity. I rem…

If you can't gift items, it seems like a huge missed opportunity because I feel like there's a lot of things people don't buy for themselves but they might be willing to buy for other people as a gift.

For instance I don't think I would ever spend 30 dollars on a bottle of wine to drink at dinner, but I could pay 50 or 60 to buy a bottle of wine as a special gift to a friend.

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

#585

Post by snek_case » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

wbobeirne wrote: post #583

reggieband wrote: post #579

I know this is a crazy thought and not inline with a lot of the blizzard hate - but why don't games like this allow more gifting style mechanics? I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity. I rem…

You end up with a huge security incentives problem. If there's a way to extract the value from one account and give it to another, you massively increase the incentive to phish users, set up black markets for buying items off of a hacked account, or just transfer it to your own.

You could set up a payment system to buy items that's not a player account. You buy an item just to give. There's still a phishing incentive, but is it worse than any of the other content you can buy online?

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

#586

Post by robertlagrant » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

csa wrote: post #534

hw wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. While some businesses abuse SaaS pricing (e.g., MS office for very basic uses, acrobat pro for basic uses, etc.), I think the SaaS pricing model has aligned the interests of developers and consumers (esp. smaller devs and smaller consumers) in a way that has allowed a wi…

I still don't understand how people sell small SAAS products with the per-country VAT rules.

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

#587

Post by luckluckgoosed » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #54

The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game? As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessar…

I've played about 12 hours of Diablo Immortal. I haven't spent any money, but also haven't really looked into why I would want to do it. The game is already pretty easy, and I feel like spending for better gear would make it almost non-sense, where I can just stand around while my minions kill the enemies. If they wanted to encourage micro-transactions, they should have made it a lot more challenging, so that you'd actually you know, die sometimes.

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

#588

Post by noirbot » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #572

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t play the “accessibility” nonsense argument with us old-time gamers. You know what I could have done in D3 to skip the grind, if I wanted to? Use cheats or trainers or a save file from the internets, in a single player game, for which I paid for. Not this nonsense today, where even single player games are gated behind “sErViCeS” backend to prevent cheating, aka DRM for the payed DLC stuff, that is already on dis…

D3 is in fact not very single player for all but the most casual players who stop at finishing the story solo.

Really? I did plenty of pushing into high-tier rifts solo in D3. It's definitely more stable and reliable with multiple people, but I did plenty of grinding solo and have a good time.

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

#589

Post by minimaxir » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #579

I know this is a crazy thought and not inline with a lot of the blizzard hate - but why don't games like this allow more gifting style mechanics? I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity. I rem…

There are a few F2P games which offer a wishlist/gifting mechanic. (I know Path of Exile does).

Unclear how successful it would be.

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

#590

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #579

I know this is a crazy thought and not inline with a lot of the blizzard hate - but why don't games like this allow more gifting style mechanics? I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity. I rem…

Whoa, very interesting! i'd love to play this game.

> spending of a whale whose campaign I was joining.

Also, for me very punishing mechanics with high risk, high reward games have had an underserved market place. I love pking on a variety of different MMO's and sometimes when you are pking in max gear you are risking 10g's IRL. Full Torva on runescape is 6g's and once you add up the rest of the rings and amulets, you can easily be risking $15,000.00 IRL money.

However, there is no benefit to anyone besides yourself. Clans are 'superficial' as there is no real 'shared loot' system, clan building requirements outside 'daily's', but being the biggest clan doesn't give you 'benefits' outside a few dailys and some xp.