I’m probably going to get hate for this, but was just a thought I had today. Not saying it should be one way or another.
But I’m so surprised that wow has a store but D3 doesn’t. It would fit D3 a lot better, think of POE. Could get different appearances for sets, wings, spell effects etc. I wouldn’t mind some cool strictly cosmetic affects as long as they don’t distrupt gameplay.
They also might be able to actually afford to pay their employees instead of firing them all if they made a little extra money.
Modern Blizzard wants to monetize everything, so it probably would have gotten it except reportedly the powers that be all but abandoned Diablo 3 just before Reaper of Souls came out and it was pretty much just a minimal crew.
Also, them not paying their employees a living wage has very little to do with how much money they’re making. They’ve posted record profits 2 years in a row now.
In 2015, patch 2.2.0 was datamined and found to have pay2win mtx. This caused an uproar on the NA and EU forums. This datamining and subsequent Blue posts that were done in “damage control mode”, resulted in many gaming sites covering the issue of Blizzard not having learned their lesson from RMAH and having the gall to perhaps be making another run at pay2win in NA and EU etc.
Bear in mind that cosmetic mtx might have been just fine for everyone but unfortunately the die was cast because the datamining showed pay2win XP boosts and the like. The NA and EU communities were, and perhaps still are, vehemently anti-pay2win.
Once again, senior management, just as with RMAH, completely mishandled the situation. It’s debatable on whether they intended NA and EU to have mtx after China but there were many posts like this one out there in 2015:
“…Speculation will abound, but it’s highly likely that these changes will first go live there as a test market and then make their way to the Americas or Europe regions if proven to be successful. I know many players that would exalt and cheer if that were to be the case, so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned for further reports.”
So unfortunately, in my opinion, they tried to do something with mtx in 2015 and failed in NA and EU regions because of their lack of foresight with datamining 2.2.0 and failing to get ahead of the pay2win backlash.
Others on this forum that I respect have said simply that Blizzard never had intention of bringing mtx to NA and EU - so just making sure that side of the argument is shown.
My opinion is that they did want mtx in NA and EU eventually after China (like article above) but it kind of blew up in their face. The fact that they are doing mtx in all regions with D4 tells us that as a franchise, they’re certainly ok with applying cosmetic mtx to a Diablo game.
I will never understand Blizzard’s failure to be creative with financing - they could hire anyone they like, use any 3rd party studio, use a team of interns, who knows - they could easily get a team together to add D3 features and major seasonal changes - and they could do it all in a self-sustaining way through cosmetic mtx or some form of community revenue. They just won’t do it.
D4 already has ‘monitisation’. Can we please accept at this point that D4 is on a schedual (surely no?). There are so many good games already out there. We have D2R and D;I coming out b4 D4. They can add to it after it comes out no?
I believe they were exploring MTX for D3 but at the time, MTXs were still new and controversial. So they promised players D3 would not have MTXs but I bet today, there be folks paying for cosmetics and stash space and be happy with it as long as the game continues to get updates and the prices were reasonable.
the plug has been pulled long time ago. no way to change that in a big corporate company where $$$ is more important than everything else. in fact, D3 only saw some “love” after they announced D4
Reminds me, that I was surprised, that the WoW auction house was so good programmed and the auction house in D3 was trash. They just had to copy it, but they did not.
Actually there are big transmissions for cosmeticslike buying a whole blizzard game.
I think they dont put too much effort in D3 for programming anymore, since D2R and D4 are coming and need rescources.
Indeed but too late for that. That is why they are making sure that this time that Immortal and D4 have MTX so these 2 games won’t get abandoned by upper management this time.