Just wondering as I stare at the shop screen on bnet seeing these utterly unappealing cosmetics Blizzard is trying to sell me. Like I can’t in a 1000 years imagine buying any of them for Diablo 4.
That got me thinking is there any game that failed to make it’s in-game shop profitable? I can’t find anything with a google search. That leads me to wonder if it’s always a win for the developer to have them?
H1Z1. In game shop helped its collapse
I do like how the shop skins aren’t way better than the game skins. I like some and would have bought all the druid ones, but to me I don’t like her appearance to begin with so I’m not spending money on cosmetics for her.
By the amount of people I see running around with store bought cosmetics and mounts, I would say no.
Some of the skins are wicked cool, most are lame.
All are over priced.
I haven’t looked that closely at all the classes but most of the Necromancer ones are basically just reskins/recolors of existing skins. Which is a pretty disappointing route to go. I haven’t bought anything. Going to see what the battlepass has to offer. If it gives me some platinum I may buy a bit more to splurge on something or may just let it accumulate over several seasons.
Also PoE puts the stuff in its shop on rotating sales that change out every few days. I may wait and see if Bliz does that before paying full price.
I would never spend money on cosmetic. However, I have seen people with them already. “a fool and his money.”
I bought Ill Gotten Gains for the bell emote memes.
Every time one of my friends dies in a dungeon they get the bell.
But in a serious means, not really. They also have kinda crutched themselves in promising to keep in the Diablo theme. There’s only so much silver, gold, black, red stuff they are gunna be able to sell.
I mean, if you delve into the void of mobile games and such, probably? It’d just be some incredibly obscure game that is god awful with, like, $1000 price tags on its "micro"transactions. But even then, all they’d have to do to turn a profit is meme about it to some content creators. Case in point, that one game on steam that costs like $5000 and is just a cheap visual novel. You bet youtubers bought that one.
Otherwise, unlikely. Microtransactions are, by design, very cheap and easy to make, and people are idiots. Especially since there’s an entire generation of kids that don’t know how it used to be, just want the instant gratification, are too dumb and ignorant to realise just how much they are spending on cheap, meaningless junk… and also have no idea about the manipulative tricks companies use against them, ranging from broken promises to obfuscated chrrency systems to targeted psychological practices like fomo and flashy fanfare triggering dopamine hits.
Not saying all kids are idiots like this, but there’s certainly enough of them to pretty much guarantee any microtransaction success. And of course, it’s not just kids either, though I’d say they are the bulk of them. Let us not forget that one guy who said Diablo Immortals microtransaction schemes were perfectly fine because he spends way more per year on Clash of Clans and if he dumps a load of money on the game then he should be able to stomp everyone else and it’s fine because “other people who also dumped all that money are on even ground with me”.
Mobile games in particular are full of people like that and that is why we will never see the end of increasingly overpriced and scummy microtransaction schemes, because while it might be overpriced and scummy enough to stop you from buying into it, you were never the target demographic anyway so they don’t care
It’s a good question and I’ve thought much about this one and if people are actually buying this twaddle.
And I’m someone who spent way too much on HOTS skins over the years.
But that summer fun Tracer got water balloon bombs and squirt guns with sfx etc.
We get nothing like that here.
I guess what I keep thinking is:
If I’m someone that would usually support a game I like and buy skins if they are cool and I don’t want to buy these, Who is?
But also:
What would they have to change for me to want to?
And I can’t think of an answer to either.
there’s one company that was almost hated by all called “allods”
and now i feel Diablo immortal is nearly at that part.
it is just pure cash grab, it’ll make good money now but u’ll never have long term players.
Yet both of those are churning out massive profits. That’s the issue. They don’t try to appeal to the average joe player. They appeal to the whales with way too much money on their hands and way too little intelligence to know better and way too little willpower to resist the psychological strategies employed against them.
Rogues and Barbarians basically, since they don’t use Int or Will badabum tsh
those are just parasite devs, too common in chinese and korean games.
I just worry about the ease of profit that comes from microtransactions. It’s so easy for them to make money with almost zero cost associated with it to the business.
The reason I worry is because at some point this is going to come at a significant cost to the quality of video games as developers realize they don’t need to worry about that. Perhaps it has already happened.
I think Shadow of Mordor (or War?) had a rough go of MTX. They ended up scrapping the MTX system and turned it into a far more enjoyable game. Then had 2 (?) expansions, I think.
There’s some Marvel game by Gazillion that went defunct. I think it was an MMO/ARPG style on an MTX model that webt kaput. I recall lots of drama surrounding it.
There’s TONS of mobile games that are MTX based and go bye-bye.
The shop cosmetics are leagues beyond the boring in-game shniz. My Barb looks fabulous.
It has already happened. Happened a long time ago. I mean, look at Dead Space. The first two games were great. The third decided to throw in an ingame store where you can buy all the crafting materials, guns and ammo you could want. And while it’s a serviceable game on its own, you just know focus was taken off the game for it.
How about Darktide? A full priced game full of overpriced microtransactions, which was extremely full of gamebreaking bugs in every aspect… except for the store, which ran perfectly.
Then there’s Overwatch 2, which had the same issues as Darktide, deleted Overwatch 1 entirely, ditched most of their PvE promises very early on in development without telling anyone since they knew it’d affect the profit margin otherwise, slapping a paywall on what is left of those promises (and attaching it to the battlepass coz why not) and are now slowly reverting away from every design that justified calling it “Overwatch 2” in the first place and moving back to Overwatch 1.
This is just off the top of my head but there are countless examples of quality being dropped in favour of making a quick and easy profit. Expansions used to cost a bit more but contained way more content, often to the point where they were practically new games. Now we have cheap and easy to make skins that cost just as much as those expansions used to, and were likely something that was just ripped out of the base games content anyway.
Is this guy really mad that the real money stuff is not better than in game stuff?
The Battle Pass is going to have Platinum as something you can earn as you tier it up.
So you see these $25 cosmetics thinking they’re too expensive.
But once Blizzard throws you $10 in free platinum that $25 skin for $15 doesn’t seem so bad.
It’s the same thing as stores raising their prices 20% a few days before declaring a sale.
I’m glad that the store cosmetics seem to be rather in line with what you can earn in game. The only thing I’ve seen that’s “flashy” is that Necromancer Wraith skin.
it’s funny how the game shop have more updates at light speed than the core game itself. there are surely some greedy evil goblins in their team.
if the quality of the game and cosmetic is same as the one Black Desert Online, I’ll be grinding off my bank now lol, but I don’t find any long term value in this game + there is no social aspect.