LogFAQs > #965838373

adjl posted...

Side note: I fully expect that Immortal is as bad as it is for the sake of anchoring: They know it's bad, and that the vast, vast majority of their core audience will be furious with them over it, but the long-term result of that is that they'll be able to monetize D4 harder and it will still seem reasonable by comparison. It's no coincidence that Immortal launched just a couple weeks before new previews came out amounting to "look guys we're making the Diablo game you really want." I don't doubt for a second that all of this has been carefully designed to manipulate the core Diablo audience into letting Actiblizz push the boundaries of "acceptable" monetization in D4.

I called this as far back as Diablo III and the Always Online/Real Money Auction House kerfuffles. Blizzard's protestations to the contrary, it was never about improving the quality of the game or any such nonsense.

They were pushing the envelope on what was acceptable to monetize back then and how much they were willing to design the game around it. They made the game always-online, with zero justification, because it was a way to allow them to continually manipulate people and monitor their gaming habits so they could fine-tune the system. They eventually removed the RMAH (after they'd presumably already bilked most of the money out of it that they expected to get) to try and make it look like they still gave a shit about the quality of the end product.

It was endlessly frustrating to me that so few people seemed to care about this as a problem or realize the ramifications it would have on the industry.