Sure, but opinion about quality is just subjective and much less usefull as indicator compared to sales.
Also regarding D3, it was the best selling pc game of all times roughly half a year after release with ~6million sales. Until 2015 it had 30million+ sales.
Most sales came years after release, that can by no means be put on hype. People knew what they would get and still bought it.
I enjoy D2 and D3 for different reasons. They do different things, but do them quite well. D4 on the other hand bores me. I can play maybe an hour at a time and then log out of boredom. I get addicted to the gameplay loop of arpgs, but not this time around.
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Itâs also important for us all to be on the same page - for Activision Blizzard, one of the kings of the industry, something is internally a failure if it doesnât have a continous revenue stream bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Every IP has to compete with the likes of World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and other heavily monetized IPs. A game canât just be good, it has to be great, it has to reap dollars upon dollars.
Diablo 4 coming to market and charging 70$ on top of a cash shop on top of a battle pass is Blizzard showing strength. They know theyâve made a great game and they know they can monetize it to the extent that their corporate overlords demand. Just being successful is not enough, it has to be a cash cow. Diablo 3 didnât have the MTX hooks to justify continued investment, thatâs why we have Diablo 4 in the first place - a rebuild of Diablo 3âs system with those hooks in place.
TL;DR: If Path of Exile was a Blizzard product, it would have been canceled a year into its life. So that sets some context for what Blizzard considers a failure.
Most of the high quality super rares in D2 are found by bots because getting a well rolled high value rare is so rare itâs comparable to winning the lottery. Most players (aside from the 10 year addicts) donât bother IDâing them because it slows down your farm rate and you find fewer runes etc.
PoE was literally made by the dev team from Diablo 2, if it hadnât of been it wouldnât have even survived itâs first year.
Diablo 3 was a success, in every metric you want to measure for a stand alone game, what caused problems was itâs AH and itâs lack of monetization in the burgeoning FPT business model world / Cash shop rip off that was becoming the norm.
I hate when people say âitâs FTPâ
FREE TO PLAY is a business model, its a business model so successful it forever altered modern gaming and the revenue streams you can generate from them.
FTP is not open source, non profit, its the most predatory money making system ever seen digitally.
FPT is not a poor company leveraging itself to heroically bring gamers a real game for gamers made by gamers, its a choice to continually make your market pay for make believe stuff, they can never own, touch or sell on again, its genius and thatâs why itâs so prevalent.
The makers of PoE had backers, they had investors they also made a choice to crowd fund part of the costs and they didnât do it because they are nice guys, they did it to have an even bigger profit margin, because players who back DO NOT GET SHARES OR A DIVDEND PAYOUT.
I do think there needs to be something more than just being able to target specific items in the world via Helltides or Whispers. That just feels like a chore with the randomness of it all. Even then Whispers rewards are random and Helltides are on a timer. Specifically targeting certain affix roles or improving the chances at certain affixes perhaps with a drawback of some sort would be an improvement.
Perhaps a more permanent currency called Hell Brands for example that you can also trade freely added to the gameplay loop allowing you an increase targeted chance at an affix, the ability to boost it for a higher cost + gold, and maybe even a way to expand on this system. Youâd do this via an NPC in the world at a crafting table or whatever and maybe even get the option to roll new affixes.
Call it the Hell Brand codex I guess.
Also maybe allow additional upgrades on gear while still leveling so you can push more power out of an item while leveling before you have to find a potential upgrade.
I just sell anything that isnât legendary/unique. The 1 second per battle a potential yellow upgrade would have saved me isnât worth combing through thousands of them.
If they removed trash loot from the game you would not be earning enough gold to keep up with the various sinks.
The âthinkâ they made a great game. And they will surely stick to that opinion for quite some time. (which is totally normal and ok)
If it actually is a great game will be seen in a year if people still buy it and actually spent money in the shop.
Only if players actually run away, which they see with their internal statistics and tools and do not spent money in the shop, only then they would do drastic changes.
Or they basically just drop it like D3 and concentrate on other games that actually make that continious money.
And do not misunderstand me, i do not âhateâ D4 or even think D3 is just better, i am just disappointed because the item hunt in D4 is not rewarding.
After they added sets and some dozens uniques, it may be a fun game for me.
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D3 is like the new Star Wars trilogy, it was a big letdown and might have damaged the brand but it made a ton of money so the investors and company donât care that much. Ditto D4 now. Itâll cause problems for them eventually from the brand slowly degrading, but Blizz had a huge amount of good will and they still have a long, long, way to fall before they start having real commercial failures.
I doubt they care that much at this point, this game was targeted for box sales and they got a ton of box sales. Theyâll release stuff but theyâre probably already shifting the dev teams and shrinking down the D4 team. This game is already a commercial success, they donât have to keep chasing it.
POE needs to keep releasing big content patches because itâs F2P and they rely on recurring MTX sales and long-term players.
Theyâre working on season 2 content, working on Expansion 1 content, and expansion 2 is in pre-production.
In what way does that signal a lack of faith?
Lol this dude clearly never played vanilla D2 LOD, only played mods.
Lol Kathleen Kennedy, is that you?
Point is expansions will generate another $70 box sale or whatever. If they lose a bunch of players before then with a poorly thought out endgame they donât really care.
Well, first of all, that doesnât make sense because the season pass model relies on players putting down 10$ every 3 months.
Second of all⌠what exactly is your point? That Blizzard is happy to make a game that is one of the best selling games on the market and people eat up the expansions, but donât want to play it literally every day of every week of every month of their lives? That theyâre happy with tens of millions buying their game and their expansion and theyâre not heartbroken if people decide to enjoy other Blizzard products? What, exactly, are you trying to argue here?
You understand that the PoE model isnât really healthy, right? Thereâs a reason that PoE is a small, mostly failing game that probably only has a few thousand paying players out of its 20,000 free to play playerbase. Most people enjoy when games respect their time and donât try to own their life.
Itâs also relies on paying dev salaries to make content. The more content the more they pay.
Or they can release lazy seasons, collect $10 from the eternal blizz fans, and then pump the wider public for the expansions for the big money.
Two modes for seasons.
D2 Mode - smart loot turned off, items balanced around trade, open trade, trade hubs.
D3 Mode - SSF loot pinatas and rainbow ponies.
Not sure if a more recent metric has been released, but I remember reading a headline from some rando gaming site (think it was Game Rant?) saying only 6,000 people have reached level 100.
Could be an old metric, but even if we raise it to 1.2 million level 100âs running around, this game sold what, 666 million in sales? Even if half of those never bothered to play even once, for whatever reason, and we divide the rest by the most cost prohibitive measure ($100 editions) thatâs over 3 million players.
When less than 1/3 of your playerbase is at the level cap, can we really be throwing down about how end game is causing the retention drop?
I wish they would focus more on the game now pull some of the expansion team and get us more stash tabs and a gem tab, crazy itâs gonna take 8 months to add that
You donât need to be level 100 to feel the âend-game burn-outâ.
Prior to the changes to NMD XP, around level 75-80 a feeling would settle in that you just had this monolithic grind ahead of you. I think thatâs mostly fixed with the NMD XP changes, you get about a paragon point every run now and feel constant forward momentum, but the online discourse is slow to catch up. Asmongold malding about getting one-shot and feeling like heâs leveling too slowly made the rounds already.
I do think some players have fallen off until season 1, but that was to be expected. Maybe a bit more than ought to have, but the majority of those who took a break will be back season 1 presuming it has a good offering of content.
4 months, and theyâre redesigning gems as a currency, not just adding a tab for them to go into. That said, I would definitely appreciate if they could just give us more stash space now. 4 stash tabs is not enough. Not even close.
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Maybe there wouldnât be anything wrong with a spreadsheet. If it wasnât an Excel spreadsheet in test version v1.0 
It was a gargantuan success from any view. Monetarily, franchise advertisement, brand strength. Only the boomerâs on D2 eBay edition that were upset. 
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