Poll of the Day > This Diablo Immortal stuff..

(+) Yeah! (+)

My brother is "well I don't personally feel the need to spend money" coping.

you need gear to keep playing

yaknow... to be fair, if the game is legit good and you don't care about getting gear then it can't be that bad... right?

you need gear to keep playing

you don't get gear unless you pay

It really is a staggering amount of greed, but it's also going to be immensely profitable for them. That's the nature of these schemes: They don't need to be popular, they just need to get a couple of whales addicted enough to buy them a new yacht.

If you're playing just for fun...why? There are tons of similar games that you could play for fun, make progress in, and aren't designed to f*** you.

I just hope they don't pull shit like this with Diablo IV.

because that's what normal people do... play games for fun

If you're playing just for fun...why? There are tons of similar games that you could play for fun, make progress in, and aren't designed to fuck you.

because that's what normal people do... play games for fun

$1,000 to achieve everything? Sure. That would be fair.

Not unless "achieve everything" is a couple thousand hours of genuinely enjoyable content, and even then that's still not a great value given what else is out there.

I just hope they don't pull shit like this with Diablo IV.

it's so easy to regain favor with the general public and gamers especially, if blizzard can largely get away from all the sexual harrasment, abuse issues and supporting an authoritarian regime then a s***ty mobile game is nothing.

How did cyberpunk fetishize trans people?

I mean that does sounds like an incredible ability to have

I'm willing to entertain the possibility in the form of subscription fees, DLC/expansions, and/or reasonable microtransactions, so that total cost is paid over the course of many years of continuous service and new content additions and not designed to cost that much out of the gate

but that's still a pretty tall order and the vast majority of games don't stand a chance of keeping my attention for long enough to get there

and introducing stuff that affects gameplay.

I mean Diablo 3 started with shitty mechanics that nobody liked that they later removed and made the game way better for it

Even then I'd argue you better be one of the best games ever made (and not just an addiction-fueled Skinner Box) and would have to run for at least 15 uninterrupted years of constant content updates before I'd accept the argument.

(And even then, the fact that games like Kingdom of Loathing - which has been running for 20 years for essentially "free" - exist kind of undercuts the idea that games "need" to operate that way. There are ways to create and maintain self-supporting games that don't involve reaping your audience for maximum profits - publishers just refuse to make games that way.)

Worse, these days most "game-as-service" games will never keep the servers running that long. Once they've exploited the initial cash-in period (when the majority of players will pay for microtransactions or new content), they'll shut down in favor of the inevitable sequel (and next batch of having to buy everything in-game all over again). At which point you can't even play the game you've sunk so much money into.

What concerns me about Diablo 4 is how easily they can adjust the mtx system over time. It would be all too easy for them to make the offers tame at launch, then once the general playbase has decided they like the game start monetizing more aggressively and introducing stuff that affects gameplay.

You can play a ftp game without paying. It's like watching a great movie and to see the last 1/3, you gotta pay about $3000.

If you're a posting on the internet you have no excuse. This shit is meant to trick the Facebookers. You traded your soul for a brain though, you know better.

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.