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

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

#711

Post by Aeolun »

qball wrote: post #669
ajnin wrote: post #666

I hope more country follow suit of Belgium and The Netherlands and classify loot boxes with a random drop element as gambling, and as such make it heavily regulated and banned to kids. This kind of practices are evidently predatorial and manipulative and should be greatly discouraged.

>classify loot boxes with a random drop element as gambling Most people who talk about this tend to have no idea what laws already cover gambling. I think that, in this case, loot boxes should be treated like slot machines as far as minimum payout goes; in Nevada (for example) this is minimum 75% by law- meaning that the house must ultimately return 75% of the value it takes in as winnings to its gamblers. As these s…

$ of loot box / drop chance = value of asset

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

#712

Post by tubalcain »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #566
peanut_worm wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elden Ring was exactly "make good game, sell it" and it sold very well.

The "no longer works" comment clearly refers to the business model, ie. ignoring the quality or popularity of the product itself and just looking at the balance sheet. The gambling (microtransaction) model is enormously more profitable than the classical "just sell a game" model. Elden Ring was spectacularly well received and has sold millions of units, but it's "only" a game. There's no casino in the back, and there…

People are still buying Skyrim and that was made in 2011

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

#713

Post by csa »

localhost wrote: post #641
csa wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Office web apps are free with OneDrive and 5GB storage. $20/yr for 100GB. Office 365 personal is $70/yr. What would you rather see instead? Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

Good question.

Fwiw, I personally have no issue with the price.

That said, I know people who do, and I have pointed them to Libre Office.

Folks who complained, but who would probably like to know about a free version (I didn’t know there was one):

- retirees on very limited income

- unemployed people

- folks of limited means who only use any of these tools 1-5 times a year, but really need the specific MS tools those 1-5 times

I will point these people to the free web app option moving forward.

I realize that the free version won’t get a lot of marketing since it produces no revenue, but it may be prudent to have an evangelist hang out in online communities of old people, caregivers, and unemployed people and keep them informed. It would help the MS image.

I realize that such a person might exist, but the relatively large number of people who complain to me about Office pricing makes me think that the word is not being spread efficiently.

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

#714

Post by ayngg »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #623
ayngg wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to the kind of games that made Blizzard iconic like SCBW, TFT, D2, and early WoW which were basically pillars in the gaming world, the game, while polished, was a fairly mediocre Team Fortress variant in comparison. It also had lofty ambitions of sustaining a large e-sports scene to the point where investors were paying tens of millions to have the right of owning a team. That never materialized and the game…

All you said is true, but now you're shifting goal posts. You previously said Blizzard's last 'decent' game was 10 years ago, not the last game that was 'basically a pillar in the gaming wold'. While Overwatch may not have achieved it's lofty ambitions, it's still extremely well-regarded [0], had 50 million players (which is quite impressive given that it's not free-to-play) and has grossed over $1 billion. It arguab…

The game I was thinking about was Hearthstone, which basically legitimized digital card games as a mass market genre. Perhaps I am too harsh on Overwatch, but it is a lot like Diablo 3, which made huge releases with huge hype initially (based on expectations created from their earlier games) and see great initial success but ultimately are unable to retain or grow in the same way their competitors are.

Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.

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

#715

Post by [deleted] »

ajnin wrote: post #666

I hope more country follow suit of Belgium and The Netherlands and classify loot boxes with a random drop element as gambling, and as such make it heavily regulated and banned to kids. This kind of practices are evidently predatorial and manipulative and should be greatly discouraged.

[deleted]

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

#716

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #664

What upsets me is that in exchange for that money you’re treated to a low quality game. You can just feel the disdain for the user/victim at every step. While launching the game for the first time: 1) No sound! 2) Forced subtitles. 3) Visible tearing in the video because of a lack of vsync. 4) Two tracking and notification permission prompts, including one that lies to you: “Your game is better if we can target ads”.…

[deleted]

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

#717

Post by [deleted] »

xyst wrote: post #648

Gamers of todays generation have been slowly taught to accept this as the new norm. IAPs, DLCs, “pay to win”, and Battle Passes are just acceptable now. Release a half assed game in a few months. Complete the rest of the game on relaxed timeframe and release them as DLCs. Continue to milk the consumer for more $$$. Honestly the entire concept of IAPs is predatory. Consumer protection agencies need to regulate these c…

[deleted]

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

#718

Post by effingwewt »

countrpt wrote: post #600
effingwewt wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are wosrse. Gacha games are mostly card-puller games. You pay $X for X pulls, with more expensive packages giving more pulls with a supposed higher success rate of 'winning' (getting a good/rare pull). They use hidden weights, as well as max item rolls per day. This means that to keep items rare via artificial scarcity they will only allow so many of those cards to be pulled per X hours/days/whatever but the…

There are many gacha games on the market today that do post their odds and where player-validated data seems to support it. (Some jurisdictions like China and Japan require these kinds of disclosures.) But there are also a lot of markets that don’t require these kinds of disclosures and where there isn’t enough player data to draw a conclusion. So, in that case, how could you have confidence that they are not doing w…

Even regulated state lotteries do shady shit and are sued due to lying about odds and remaining prizes, and having seen first hand the way those and arcade games work.

I played some when they first dropped and the android playstore options were limited. You could see the bullshit weights first-hand if you had enough free pulls. Again, this, along with streamers doing massive pulls, and community-gathered spreadhseets are where I get my information, not from the game page that says '1 in 100 chance of legendary pull!' because, again, it's always been bullshit.

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

#719

Post by creakingstairs »

green_on_black wrote: post #662
qrazhan wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a _ton_ of successful f2p games with reasonable monetization models - Valorant, CSGO, Warzone, Dota, Path of Exile, Lost Ark, Hearthstone, etc. It's just that games in general are a power law industry - I don't think monetization model is really what will prevent a game from being successful. In fact, much of the discourse around Immortal is that the gameplay itself is in fact top notch. Blizzard has the de…

And how do those compare to the cash-grab market revenue? (Actual question). Let's include games like Genshin and FGO.

Cash grab will always be superior especially when you factor in the effort making the game. MMOs will be magnitudes harder than making mobile cash grab games.

I honestly thought it was inevitable for Blizzard to go down this route the moment I saw the revenue slides post acquisition. In that slide it showed that King’s mobile games made way more than Blizzards games. At that point, all the MBA suits in the board must have started thinking, “why go through all the hoops of making a good game when you could spend way less money and effort to milk the cash cows?”

Thus the pressure started mounting up on Blizzard to create more “efficient” games like Hearthstone and newer releases instead spending long time creating and refining a game like they have before.

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