Gamewise, I am enjoying the beta so far. It looks and feels how I expected it to and it’s incorporating the things that work in other ARPG’s that I think work. It’s definitely something that can be built upon.
Now for the price. I have already pre-purchased the game but I waited awhile, hoping that there would be a price adjustment. My wife and friends had already bought it though so no matter what, it was inevitable for me. But you no longer have to make and ship disks to people. Youtube is basically free marketing so you don’t have to spend money tons of money to promote the game. You have a battle pass for seasonal stuff. You have us for QA feedback. You have cost savings from modern tech and money generators from online-only playability and the prices keep going up. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. I know a corporations job is to make money but you don’t have to do it at the expense of your fanbase. It feels reminiscent of Hasbros recent $3000 booster pack to celebrate their anniversary.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about how much things cost to do that simply aren’t accurate.
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YouTube = Free Marketing
Nope. This isn’t even remotely true. A lot of the people posting gameplay videos, streaming the game are in some way sponsored. Game developers pay streamers to play their games. But even if Blizzard wasn’t paying a penny for YT players, YT isn’t even the main channel for marketing. It’s one of MANY, and those other paths cost a lot of money. The rule of thumb is your marketing budget is often as much as your development budget for a large game.
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Battle Pass for Seasonal Stuff
In theory, yes, this could be used to offset main development costs, but it’s an unknown at the moment. It could print money like crazy (Overwatch), or flop (D3 RMAH). If they’re smart, they’re working to be profitable just from unit sales, so all that battle pass money is profit/funds ongoing development for post-launch content.
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Community as QA
This is not the value you think it is. Real professional QA looks nothing like what we’re all doing this weekend, or last weekend, or in the earlier technical tests. If people are losing their minds right now when they get a server disconnect, they would not be able to handle what is acutally required of a QA tester on a daily basis. Right now we are basically an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters so Blizzard can see what happens when you just through volume at the servers.
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Modern Tech Cost Savings
You’re right, it’s WAY easier and cheaper to do almost everything in game dev these days vs 10 years ago… from a technical perspective. But the flip-side of that is the expectations have gone up exponentially. Better graphics, more content, higher production values etc. This has absolutely offset the cost savings from making the work easier to execute.
Cost of development has skyrocketed in the last few decades, while the dollar has decreased thanks to regular inflation. That old $50 unit price covers less and less of the costs every year. Diablo 2 sold in 2000 for $50. Today to keep even that would have to be $87.35. So at $70 you’re still getting a discount.
Diablo 4 is likely a game that will cost Blizzard at least a quarter of a billion dollars to ship. Assuming Blizzard gets to keep 70% of each unit sale across all sales channels, that means they’d need to sell 5.1 million units to break even at a $250M budget and a $70 price point. At a $50 price point they’d need to sell 7.1 million units.
And that’s just break-even. Like you said, this has to turn a profit, because it has to fund future development, keep the existing team paid, and also deliver a return to shareholders. The math gets even more crazy.
$70 isn’t greedy, $70 is where game prices need to go if they’re going to keep delivering the experiences we now expect.
If people are losing their minds right now when they get a server disconnect, they would not be able to handle what is acutally required of a QA tester on a daily basis.
I mean, obviously. Professional QA testers get paid and are judged positively on reporting bugs. Beta testers are paying for the privilege only to be denigrated by an army of unpaid Blizzard white-knights. I have no idea how you can possibly hold both groups to the same standard.
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I’m not holding them to the same standard. I was merely pointing out that OPs point on all this free testing isn’t actually that big of a benefit in terms of cost to develop the game.
Also no one is paying to be a part of the beta test this weekend.
You could definitely use the beta as an excuse to forgo as rigorous of a load test as you would normally do. The knowledge that there’s an open beta before official launch could definitely loosen up functional test plans a bit as well.
Not sure what your point is about this weekend, last weekend wasn’t an open beta and several million people participated.
The forums is filled with armchair developers like the OP that have no clue about things.
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Load tests are really the only thing public betas like this are good for at this point. You can try to simulate load all you like to try and guess at how things will go, but it’s not until you get the randomness of human players at scale that you’ll find the real weak points.
One does not preclude the other. They no doubt did very rigorous internal and simulated load tests well before last weekend. They couldn’t have handled the millions of people who played these last two weekends without it.
And my point on this weekend being free was responding to your claim of “beta testers paying for the privilege”. No one is paying for this weekend, it’s free to all, no pre-purchase necessary. You didn’t need to pay a penny to get into the game before launch. You just had to pay if you wanted it a week earlier.