Annual expansions and live service

General Discussion PC
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http s://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-gm-confirms-annual-expansions-for-the-game-2279389/

Interview with Rod Fergusson

Some quotes:

So, as we look at our quarterly seasons, and we look at our annual expansions, those are the things that we’re really focused on for our live service .

We’re always leapfrogging our seasons, and leapfrogging our expansions,

Now why i think this is not consumer friendly. Before Diablo IV i wasn’t familiar with term “live service”, it doesn’t mean that i didn’t play live service games, it means that before this term wasn’t used.

I did play F2P games with free content drops that had different monetization in forms of cosmetics and battle passes. I don’t know when “live service” term was forged and when people started to apply it to full price box games?

But to the point. The only argument that i couldn’t disagree with in regards to Diablo IV quality was that it’s a live service game and thus even though quality maybe isn’t there just yet to justify 70-100$ price, it will be in the future - because it is a live service!

But with information that they will sell expansion every year, with high certainty this argument can go to trash bin.
Usually blizzard expansions make multiplayer vanilla games a desolated land. It was pointless to play Warcraft Reign of Chaos without TFT expansion, it was pointless to play Starcraft II without HotS etc

I might be wrong and these expansions will not be impactful/needed? But this doesn’t sound good either.

So we have a 70$-100$ Diablo IV without endgame, dev during livestream even says that they don’t want players to perceive Nightmare Dungeons as end game goal and they will add proper endgame with leaderboards in season 3.

Knowing Blizzard it will be messy and it will work properly in season 4, probably last season before expansion.

So we pay upfront full AAA game price to wait 7-10 months for it to be complete, maybe enjoy it for 3-6 months. After this 3-6 months to enjoy “live service” further we will need to take out wallets again for expansion. Wonderful.

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If they want to go with in game shops and monetization, game should be free to play, but instead they went full greed, where you will have to pay for everything. Anyway what they talk now, may be not valid as soon as deal with MS goes trough, some points in the old deal was getting all Blizzard games into xbox game pass ASAP. Either way Blizzard wont get a penny more from me.

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As a concept I don’t think there’s anything tremendously wrong with providing 4 free (assuming they stay free) season updates per year and then also a purchasable expansion each year as long as the expansion price is not unreasonable (say $30/€30/£30). The developer has to make money somehow and seeing how polarising the cosmetic shop is at the moment I’d rather they do something like this and not add player power or QoL items to the cash shop instead.

We’d need to see how they handle players who don’t want to buy the yearly expansion - would they still be able to participate in free seasonal content or would they be stuck on the eternal realm only from the point the expansion is released?

My main concern specifically with Blizzard doing this is they have demonstrated several times now with their recent attitude towards their customers in Diablo, WoW and Overwatch that quality is not very high on their list of priorities for each release / update. In hindsight Diablo IV was probably released 6 to 12 months too early, the released game and current season 1 are no better than beta releases with the intention to use the “live service” model to hide behind the fact that they’re simply bug-fixing and adding missing features that should have been there at launch. There’s no real end-game content in the game, even now 3 months after release and little hope that season 2 will add a great deal more than 3 or 4 re-skinned bosses and mobs with maybe 1 or 2 new encounters.

Put simply Blizzard are not a company that respects it’s customers and their time. They always, without exception, prioritise the balance sheet way above putting in the proper amount of care and effort to deliver a decent product.

So the TLDR; is - I have no issues with the planned free seasonal and paid for yearly expansion model in general, but faith specifically in Blizzard to deliver this plan in a way that is fair and provides value to their customers has been completely shattered by their recent antics.

Sorry Blizzard, people just don’t trust you anymore.

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Totally wrong on that front. Why accept greed? There is free game of this kind with paid cosmetics, and they are able to stay on the market and even develop part 2 of the game on the side, while still providing free updates. Blizzard on the other had is here only for the money, they don’t care about much more. Its not even first time they do this.

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If you’re referring to PoE their cash shop contains convenience items as well as cosmetics so is objectively pay to win.

It all depends on if you want to go the P2W approach or would rather just pay a small amount each year and be in the position to ignore the cash shop entirely if you want too. I know people will say you can ignore PoE’s cash shop but the reality is if you want to play that game seriously you will have to buy things.

Ultimately I would hope you would read my whole post and not just the first paragraph. Irrespective of where people stand on the discussion around should the game and it’s expansions be free supported by a cash shop or should we have to pay a box price for the game and expansions I’m still calling Blizzard out on their frankly shocking attitude towards their customers and the absolutely abysmal product(s) they’ve been delivering for the last 5 or 6 years.

This company is greedy, I totally agree with that. They don’t care at all about their customers, they just want access to your credit card.

It’s the old Steve Jobs sales/product analogy in full swing. Basically the company is being steered by sales & marketing executives and the product people have been forced out of the decision making process, so now there’s no-one left that actually cares about the quality of the product within the company management anymore.

Sadly the Blizzard we used to know and love has been dead a long time.

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Pay to win what? There is no way to buy any gear in the shop its only cosmetics and some stash tabs, that you can live without if you know what are you doing, but sure they are nice to have still game is free and you can get all stash tabs for much lower price than initial price of this game, and keep them forever.
If the game has any kind of monetization it should be free, and all future content should be free as well. I’m old fashioned in this regard - there is no place for monetization if full priced games.

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Alright, I’m not getting into an argument over what constitutes pay to win or not. In my mind if there are “compulsory” items in a cash shop that you need to buy in order to be able to get the best experience out of a game then that makes it P2W, and all of the guides / reddit posts I’ve seen on PoE tell new players to buy the stash tabs, but I do appreciate that for many a game is only P2W if they sell player power so I’ll agree to disagree if that’s ok.

I do believe what we are all agreed on, though, is that this Blizzard is a scummy company with scummy practices towards it’s game monetisation and just a bad attitude all round to it’s customers and their time. They continuously fob us off with poor product and the excuse “it’s live service so we’ll fix it eventually (in season 11)”. It’s not good enough and we absolutely should not accept it.

If anyone out there still believes in Blizzard to deliver on a season / expansion plan like this in a way that produces decent quality product and is fair to the consumer then they only have themselves to blame for what comes next.

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What comes next is hype for seasons and another few million marketing campaign to hype the expansion. Obviously the expansion will be done as usual - minimal viable product.
There are still games on the market that offer decent fun for the price and are not always online or live service crap. Blizzard got their cash cow - Diablo Immortal, this one should be released with mod support and dedicated servers that players can set up for themselves - but that would provide much less profit and much more fun for players, but fun is not what Blizzard wants, they want to print money.

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Blizzard was always against moding thier game and always did fight with it. You can see how many mods any game of blizzard have …
So you did play Blizzard for first time that you want mods or idk what you were doing in last 10 years.

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Paying upfront for the game
Annual costs for an ‘expansion’,
Continuous costs for season passes,
Optional costs for in game shop stuff.

Paying three or four times where the same products used to be a one-time cost? Where other games like BG3 are one time cost?

This greed based game development company has lost me forever. THIS SUCKS.

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Their business model for this game is all wrong, because I think they misjudged how good their own game is. It’s not very good.

If D4 was ‘blow away amazing’ then a full priced game, paid DLC and a shop may work, but their game really needs a rethink to make it enjoyable.

Before they start charging for stuff, they should fix what’s broken.

I haven’t played in weeks and they will never see another penny of my money with this attitude towards customers.

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