I played it for an hour, saw 2 pop-ups with “you killed XYZ, buy this pack now at a reduced rate, 800% value” and uninstalled.
If this is the direction Blizzard will be going, I estimate D4 will be a big fail and WOW will die too.
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Yes.
I ALT+F4’d and uninstalled when I saw this:
In a diablo game. Like, shoo with forcing grouped content in a diablo game.
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It’s a mobile game with mobile game monetization.
We knew this would be the case, but its fine to play it for free just casually while waiting for diablo IV
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A smart man would see Blizzard tapping into a market that clearly has demand for a mobile, monetized ARPG. They would also see this as a good way of appeasing investors. This game will print money. And that is so good! Because Blizzard won’t be under investor pressure for Diablo 4, or even putting more microtransactions in WoW.
Whether people like Diablo Immortal doesn’t matter. What matters is that Immortal is good for Blizz. Blizzard’s job is appeasing investors. Welcome to capitalism, baby. You are not their audience, but rather you are a tool they use to satisfy their actual audience - which is the investors. More like crapitalism.
The alternative to Immortal is doing the exact same thing but in Diablo 4, OW2 or even WoW. So… why not let Blizz tap markets that have clear demand, make all the money on mobile and keep the PC games clean? Hell, the PC games then adopt a new role, where their point isn’t even to make that much money, but to keep brands in good standing.
For people to play Diablo Immortal and spend infinite money on it, Diablo 4 needs to be a good game that blows everyone away. People can only be excited for Arclight Rumble if the WarCraft franchise is in good standing - this is in fact why they announced Arclight Rumble AFTER Dragonflight.
So don’t worry - Diablo Immortal is relieving pressure exactly so Diablo 4 won’t be so heavily monetized. But Diablo 4 will be used to further monetize Diablo Immortal - maybe you get some Immortal goodies when you buy D4 and stuff like that.
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It’s a direction free mobile games are heading, or headed from.
Can’t really compare AAA game to a mobile game in any way.
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Played it yesterday and realized its a disgusting cash grab, quitted instantly
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Nope. No plans to. I will play D4 though.
I felt like being in on the party a little bit though so I got Diablo 2 for Switch and carried that around with me. Hope that sends a clear message.
People don’t buy bad products. All I can say is that Diablo Immortal isn’t for me, and it doesn’t seem to be for a lot of people which is why the hype surrounding it is practically 0.
That does not make investors happy! Investors want to invest successful companies that serve their customers well. The only problem is many of them are idiots when it comes to what they’re investing in, so they’ll force the companies to implement bad policies that they think will make them more money, but doesn’t.
World of Warcraft General Discussion?
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What worries me is that they split resources on D4 and DI.
DI looks like a piece of …, I hope D4 doesn’t go to waste because of it.
What a shame, from a respected company with awesome IP to some cashgrab mobile games LMAO.
Not for you doesn’t equal it will be a failure. What I am saying is that no matter how people with opinions online feel, the market (as far as we use profit to make decisions, i.e. capitalism) demands a game like this. In fact, due to Blizzard’s tardyness other games have made infinite money by being “Diablo 3 on a phone”. Raziel Dungeon Arena comes to mind. So the market exists, with or without Blizzard. You can talk about if its ethical to make a game like Immortal, but ethics don’t make money.
And their capitalist obligations command them into markets that demand their product. At best people can argue “it’s not for me”. But it is for a whole lot of other people.
Yes, they do. Having a good brand based on moral behaviour creates a fanbase, and a fanbase will spend A LOT of money. How do you think Blizzard grew so big in the first place? They weren’t particularly immoral along the way, were they?
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How much? Because buying an $60 game without microtransactions caps you at spending $60 for the lifetime of the game. I own Diablo 3, plus the expansion and dlc, twice - once on PC and once on console. This has, altogether, cost me around $100. You think that’s A LOT of money, as you’d say?
You realize that the mobile market is more profitable than console and PC combined, and one of the main reasons is that your spending is uncapped. In order for loyal users to spend money, they need to have things to spend money on, and in this sense one-time purchases really go against your argument.
Just take a look at the revenue of CoD Mobile - that game alone saves Blizzard’s finances. For loyal customers to spend A LOT of money, their spending needs to be uncapped. And that’s done through microtransactions.
The problem isn’t Immortal. It is that the world is driven by profit. And it is impossible to criticize Blizzard without criticizing the system they need to exist in.
4 Likes
For about 5 minutes, got bored.
Yeah but they sold 30 million copies. That’s $1.8bln.
And that’s the low bound, high bound is $3bln.
It was very worth it.
It took them 3 years to match the revenue generated by the much cheaper to make CoD Mobile in just a year? And, of course, the D3 revenue is capped by the sales, meanwhile CoD mobile will continue generating more revenue every month through simply existing. And quite a lot of these 30 million copies were console sales. In fact it was the game’s PS3 and Xbox360 release that helped it break the 20 million mark in 2014. Then it came out on the PS4/Xbone later in that year, and in 2015, broke the 30 million mark. Blizz has said these ports were really hard to make, that they had to basically remake the whole game to get them to work (which is why D3 on PC can’t get controller support), so they weren’t cheap. And Blizz had to make 5 of those things to get to the 30 million mark.
It is important to note that Blizz had a 2nd expansion for D3 in development, which was canned because Blizzard considered D3 a failure.
And also it is important to note that for a lot of people, buying D3 was an investment and there was a whole industry around that game’s RMAH for a while. Especially when it allowed you to cash out through paypal. This ability to “play2earn” D3 is what drove its success.
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What are you talking about. They want more money and if they think they could make more money by putting more stuff into wow, that would happen. If this game is succesfull, they’ll turn it up. They’ll turn it up as much as possible, there is zero goodwill in their practices.
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That’s not how business works, though. There’s a reason why terms like “business strategy” exist. “Let’s blast our consumers with mtx so they quit right now” is not a business strategy, my dude. In fact, if you take a look at the history of gaming, CHANGING an existing game’s monetization model is always a problem. However, releasing a new game with a different monetization model usually goes smoother.
WarCraft has brand value. WoW in a way exists as an advertisement and as such, it needs to be liked. Then you’ll get games like Arclight Rumble and possibly more on mobile, which will make bank off the brand that WoW maintains. Hell, you’ll probably see some Netflix series at some point in the future that help increase brand awareness. What you think Riot made Arcane because they just like animation? Arcane was just a very, very expensive League of Legends ad.
You don’t need an education to get basic business strategies. I’ll give you more basic strategy - almost all morning cartoons that we grew up with were ads to sell products to children. Pokemon, Digimon, Transformers, ALL the Marvel cartoons were very expensive ads. This is why the shows were free to watch - because they made money through toy sales. However, nobody will buy toys, unless the shows are good and get the kids to want the toys. So they needed to build a good brand to make money.
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It has nothing to do with diablo outside the name. It’s like some reptiloid monster carrying the skin of a good game. Don’t consider it diablo, or even a blizzard game. It’s another mobile garbage that is made to psychologically impact weak willed people from getting rid of their money.
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Yeah, that’s why I said if they could. I wanted to point out that if they won’t add more monetization to a game it’s not because out of good will but because it makes sense from a business perspective. I disagreed with the statement that “because now game X makes more money, they won’t need to make more money from game Y”.
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No.