I paid 50$ for the game to go on life support less than 2 years after release. I would pay a full subscription to have real seasons.
My best guess is there’s some sort of clause where the original developers get a portion of proceeds from any kind of monetization. Because it sure as hell makes zero sense to me why they didn’t monetize d2r to keep itself going, when Acti-Blizz is greedier than Scrooge.
There isn’t a ratio of money where it would ever make sense for them to go hard against botting or JSP.
I mean perhaps out there there is someone willing to pay 10 million per year to play D2R but they’d be the only person left. But ban waves and JSP members not existing would limit any funding by your subscripting far too much. And by the time you increase the subscription cost high enough to make up for the lost botters and JSP users you will have priced out the core user base that is left in monthly fees.
This pyrrhic loop of funding subpar games needs to stop. It’s just not a sustainable direction and the latest Diablo games are proof of that.
I refunded D4 out of principle. It’s not a good Diablo successor yet. Maybe in time it will be.
I disbelieve that games need to be live services to be profitable. Before WoW came along D2 was a very big financial success for the company. Diablo as an IP wouldn’t exist without D1/D2.
So a lot of mixed reviews on D4 are thanks to either D2 or D3 fans voicing their distaste for the game and the direction it went. D2 fans want better itemization and D3 fans want that too. So there are things both camps agree on.
D3 players probably won’t ever touch a game like D2 but that’s the thing they don’t need to. D3 is in its own bowl. So is D2. They both have niche audiences.
So how do you continue to provide content for smaller more niche audiences? You can cut a lot of stuff out. Namely the expensive cinematics, the expensive marketing campaigns (because your audience is niche anyway) and the expensive new Art.
What D3 and D2 fans just want is their game to receive regular updates to acts, bosses, game modes, etc. As the games continue to get new developer energy put into them their fans will come back and play the games. Now you just need to monetize those small updates.
The stash is still primordial by comparison to the pay-to-own stash of PoE. So small for-profit updates to the game could be how you deal with the developer cost. I’m fairly sure D2 fans would pay for new items, new acts, deeper crafting with the cube, skill rebalancing, new game modes, etc. Bundle that up into a seasonal expansion and maintain a legacy standard mode which is nothing new for the business.
They could continue to have the “big tent” ideology of giving everyone some of what they want but D4 is proof that doesn’t work. People are just different and want for different things. As a for-profit company you just have to find a way to work that.
And this here is precisely why you get games like Diablo IV.
By being so eager to let them nickel and dime you, they get the greenlight to put a lot of emphasis on monetization at the game’s expense. Even PoE is using predatory tactics to squeeze money out of its player base.
What we should be expecting first is a proper finalization of the game, and then (and only then) do they get to make expansions or DLCs. Polishing the product for free is part of what should be expected from full-priced games, and if they do not do that, it is a very bad idea to buy their games on release date.
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So who pays the devs for the updates if you’re not charging customers? Where does that money come from?
Game developers don’t typically have huge revenue streams because of the cost of development. Blizzard is no exception. GGG funds PoE development entirely off of MTX.
An indie studio with a development budget for one or two developers can afford to release free updates to a game such as Terraria which is a small development team with a successful IP.
I’m realistic. Blizzard doesn’t and has never made games for free. However mismanaged the IPs are today you’re still going to have to pay for them. It would be no different when FROM releases the Elden Ring expansion it will have a price tag on it.
Yeah, the D4 expansion questionnaire was grotesque. Let’s just look at the sheer number of developers Blizzard is employing now. That explains why. They don’t want Diablo to fail as an IP. So they’re throwing money at it.
You act as if Blizzard didn’t for years fund WoW on box prices, expansion packs, subscription plans and store MTX.
D4 is bad because D4 is a bad game. It’s not because Blizzard is trying to salvage it by throwing money at it. They should have stuck with a brand new D4 in the theme of D2 and gave the D3 fanbase a bone with a D3 expansion leading into D4. That’s too late to fix now. So I think it makes sense to monetize all 3 games.
The game doesn’t need infinite updates. Just polish the product, then you can sell expansions for extra content. If they start the monetization train, monetization will be the focus, not good content.
D4 is bad because they put their focus on making money before putting the focus on making a good product. A lot of choices allowed the game to reach a very wide audience, but they made the game a bland AAA product.
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What you’re saying requires a few assumptions. Namely that the company can afford to continue polishing a product without a financial gain.
Of course I say this knowing there is an ENORMOUS problem between shareholders and wage earners in most of the world. Corporations especially publicly traded corporations exist to make money for their shareholders. After paying their employees, lenders and partners they pay their shareholders.
What’s the answer here? Blizzard is owned by Microsoft and Microsoft is a publicly traded company. This isn’t going anywhere.
Polishing the product should be budgeted before even releasing the game on the market. If they don’t budget for that, then the public should avoid buying future titles from that company. Of course, if the game completely fails to sell, then it is legitimate to cut the polishing budget, but otherwise you should expect proper polishing after the game is released.
Polish, even though not giving direct money to a game, does improve a company’s image, which is very important and the reason why players have been giving so many chances to Blizzard to finally produce a new quality game despite its many failures.
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I work in software dev and have for more than 15 years. What you’re saying here is rather clueless about the industry, the workforce, the technology which is perpetually shifting.
No game has released in such a polished shape that people are always happy with the game. Even the most lauded companies such as Larian in 2023 have released games which weren’t polished. That after all is why Divinity has an enhanced edition.
Now I’m not being unfair to Larian. A lot of what you’d call polish is discovery. Neat things others would consider to be comfort or QoL tend to emerge AFTER the release of the product.
The company didn’t think D4 was bad. They clearly spent years on it shaping it to be what we got. So the assumptions were incorrect. The game sucks. Who knows if they will turn it around. I’m not waiting for that.
Yes they are pressured to release games on a deadline that is satisfactory to the executives and shareholders. This is why as a software dev I am most alert on project meetings and I am firmly negative on planning. This is a healthy position for me, the company and the laborers.
Of course I’m not alone. I’m always accompanied by Joe Hero who can provide a multi-million dollar project within the marketing deadline. They are everywhere and they’re all typically full of hot air. This has nothing to do with shareholders nor the corpos. As an example this is what I see and it’s nothing unique to my industry it also afflicts the gaming software industry.
We would obviously like our games to be super polished and have none of the cruft we dislike. It’s not going to happen in 2024 with the current labor trends and demographics. The best we can hope for is this little sandbox we enjoy gets some love once in awhile. Let the masses have games like D4. It’s ultimately not made for us.
That is in no way what I said. What I said is that you should already know what budget you are going to put into polishing the game after launch before you release it. If you don’t intend on polishing the game after launch, free of charge, then we shouldn’t buy your game.
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You said verbatim that “Polishing the product should be budgeted before even releasing the game”
And yes that is unrealistic. We can go back decade by decade to show that games were and are released all the time in an unpolished shape. I am also very old and remember all the unpolished garbage that came out on the consoles in the 80s.
It would be preferable they came out polished but that rarely happens. Not every company is FROM soft.
D3 fans maybe. All i wanted from D2R was regular D2 with better graphics and some slight improvements as in more 85 zones, quality of life changes like quick cast, some help to struggling builds (think fire druid more than Mosaic, Mosaic was a big fail on their part.)
I didn’t want runewords like mosaic, ground and temper that trivialize the game. Ground alone makes gloams a non issue as long as your resist is capped.
Of course some updates will be bad. We voice the reasons why and they will eventually get rid of it. It took some time for GGG to remove Archnemesis from PoE but they did.
I would personally like to see a new mode in hell (call it impossible) that just disables all rune words. That would become the typical playground for pre-1.10 D2 fans.
Yes, this means making your calculations on how you are going to spend money. It doesn’t mean already spending it at that point.
Sorry if my wording was not clear enough.
The point is : you should already have plans for polishing the game at that point. If not, then that’s a huge failure (or outright a scam if it’s intentional) from the studio.
No!
I would not pay a monthly fee.
I will buy decent or better content though.
I’d pay for the content from the cancelled successor as well. The cancelled d3 in early 2000s.
Add it to D2R and i will buy it.
i don’t appreciate you putting words in my mouth, i don’t want any of that, i want the exact opposite since they’ve proven they don’t know what d2 players want, i want them to take BACK most of their changes and then just leave the game alone. it’s already a master piece. which they… almost ruined.
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Akshually, most Nintendo first party games are released in a polished enough state you would never need to update them again.
There are exceptions like the new pokemon game, but they are the outlier, not the rule. Nintendo is literally the only big name company that cares about its reputation and releases fully finished games, barring expansions and minor dlc’s.
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another wow? with monthly supscription darn no!!
I would pay 1 USD per month easily but honestly I don´t wont infinte changes to this game. I just want to see this happen:
Season 6 - Calling to Improve Itemization
And some QoL features like a very basic basic lootfilter (no lower pots, scrools or reduced font size etc.), stackables (up to 10x or 99x for gems, runes, keys). Maybe adding the three missing quests in act 4 and relocate Cain in act 5.
Some class balance changes as proposed here:
Season 6 - Proposed Class Balance Changes
And some love for Act1 and especially Act 3 mercs.
Season 6 - Few Merc Improvements
That would be emough for 3-4 skilled devs over 12 months I would assume. Therfore I would be happily pay 5 USD per every additional char slot every season!
If combined with the need to complete every season with a new char (hell) in order to be able to purchase 1-2 new slot every season would even help to fill the servers a bit as well!
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