Only Blizzard has data on who are the core audience, the rest are just speculation. What we know this is a game owned by Microsoft under Game pass after 70B acquisition, so we can speculate the shift of core audience unless we have real data.
All game only care about change affecting majority players, as we also don’t have data about who is the major.
companies with nearly no playerbase? good example of a company and game not to take examples from. it failed horribly and noone plays anymore.
LE is a mirror of D4 which sold well during launch and lost of lot players afterwards. They are trying to regain its popularity by introduce same seasonal feature to both seasonal and Eternal realm which is a welcome mode. I don’t play Indie game like LE I prefer game with better graphic, but I admire a great move by LE put this seasonal/eternal feature to vote so players have a say on their development decision. The have the choice to stop release new content as they have earned so much money during launch. Thats how Microsoft and EA manage their successful launch triple A game which flop after few seasons.
Blizzard did send out survey too, but it is to limited users. From all their previous comment about survey, look like they only target casual players which they believe it their main target audience. Blizzard even release the complete Build set in next season objective which will benefit the casual players more.
LE is years behind the ball when it comes to ARPG QoL Features.
They will be a much successful game if they have a financial backing like Tencent who backed POE, so they can compete with Triple A game with more budget in graphic, animation and marketing.
Other successful seasonal Life Service game is Helldivers 2, a small Indie studio but with backing from Sony. Although they received a severe backlash recently from what Sony did by undermine them. 
Actually, LE has financial support from Tencent.
but most importantly because of their willingness to let us design, create, operate, and grow how we see fit,** we have accepted a low-equity investment from Tencent Games.
To clarify about Tencent invested minor equity in LE.
Many company nowadays not willing to take risk in release big budget game with great graphic to avoid risk of bankruptcy if the sales not meeting target. Some studio actually went bankrupt in recent years and Microsoft also closed few of its low performance studio they acquired.
we dont know anything about Tencets investment into LE, as no official numbers were released. so you cant know how “minor” it was.
either way, this topic is absolutely overdue for closure. Blizzard already confirmed they are sticking to the seasonal model as it works right now. so yea, case closed.
take a look at ESO and you will understand how company can nicely balance everything
As you said it was a poor example because it invalidates the point you presented before regarding eternal.
Moreover, even though D4 is a $70 dollar game, it is and was marketed as a GAAS, so it needs money influx constantly to keep on going, liking it or not it means that the 70 bucks is the starter price, the rest comes from things like the shop and the game is designed to also make money around it.
[quote=“Codyjt-11962, post:1372, topic:155970”]
It was a different time, but the game that started this whole genre (d1) had no seasons and was extremely successful. D2 followed suite and was also extremely successful… [/quote]
I agree it was a different time, D1 was inspired by rogue-like games of the time, and turned out ti basically become a rogue-lite one. D2 expended a lot but also deviated from D1, specially on this rogue-like part, its scope was too big for it, at the same time as you said it was a genre-definer and a lot of people liked this new approach, however as any new diablo sequences it was never a consensus, D2 was criticised a lot in its launch too because of these changes.
Well, this is the part I disagree and you can see in Diablo 2 game design documentation and interviews with some of it’s creators like Brevik that the ladders didn’t arrive only because there were no more expansions planned.
It arrived targeting to fix a problem with the genre it’s created, which is you get very powerful with a lot of items then you have nothing more to do and stopped playing, plus the game had open trading and new players couldn’t get close to it because the market was already in a very late stage, the permanent items in the “Eternal” realm mitigates any sense of progression, in addition as most games there were duppes, cheating, exploits etc., that persisted forever because of that.
The ladders arrived as a way to mitigate that and from time to time a fresh start could happen, then devs realised that adding some new stuff like exclusive items and ubers would incentivise people on playing that (even the whales and collectors), that way the game could be healthier at least more times a year. This is happening for more than 20 years now, you remove this part in that game and all the problems above start happening again, or you can check the state of D2 standard realm.
Again, as you said this ladder system made a lot of fans and also defined the genre as you can see in multiple derived games, so it is expected that a bunch of people like it.
As you can see I love the lore of Diablo and also the franchise as a whole. However, I can’t see how seasons are a detriment to that, in this regard it is actually amazing a mechanism that can introduce more content, provides fun and don’t break the core game forever. It also not stop the game to receive expansions, that thanks to the current diablo model, is aiming to be far more frequent, yearly or so.
Sure, I agree, but I am defending my PoV based on the game I bought that is live, with the seasonal model I expected it had as announced. Also not so long ago, the game producers themselves said the game was doing well.
While the idea of changing the seasonal model to be better is completely based on assumptions of what some players would want now and if they are the majority or not.
All game producer will say their game doing well, we will only able to verify this when the company disclose their financial as it is mandatory as a public traded company.
Blizzard has included a seasonal “Care package” with complete set of build next season and Change the Armor cap from scaling with monster level to a fix 9230 at player level 100. They said this is due to the AR cap is a hidden mechanic and lead to players get one shoot in PIT because they are not aware of how to achieve the armor cap. As most of the experience players know how to calculate the armor cap of a T199 monster, it is very clear all the changes of Blizzard are targeting casual players.
The question is, what is the game mode most casual players will enjoy? I would not speculate as this is up to Blizzard to figure out as it is their business. I am just play the game if I wish to, at any time if I like the content.
Why would characters a couple of years from now have so much power?
Simply don’t have ridiculous power creep.
That should be the goal regardless of season content.
Those are temporary gimmicks, so they would not be able to stack. When a new one arrives, the previous one is removed.
In the end, the only way to create a successful game is by appealing to a niche.
Would Fortnite potentially reach more players if they added a turnbased 4X strategy game mode? Probably. But it would likely not do anything good for the existing playerbase.
But in those rare cases where you can broaden your games appeal, at virtually no additional cost, such as by offering the content you have already made, in both Eternal and Season, yeah, just a no-brainer to do that.
If anything, the biggest money makers have tended to be someone doing a different thing than what already worked.
That would sadly not stop a greedy publisher. Heck, WoW got some P2W elements, despite having both a base game cost, and subscription.
Really? Seasons have never been the norm in live-service ARPG’s? Since when? what live-service ARPG’s have you played that dont have seasons?
He said A-RPGs. He is correct.
Awesome Necro post.
TLDR version
op has nfi
Season ard here to stay
Season reset is here to stay
Battle pass will remain season exclusive
Eternal won’t get Seasonal questline or theme
And this is all a good thing
I’ll preface this by saying I am a seasonal only player.
Even if they added seasonal content to eternal, couldn’t they just remove parts later that they didn’t want to keep?
It really wouldn’t be any different. “Limited time to play with hearts” for example.
They wouldn’t have to keep everything and bloat it even if all the seasonal content was part of “eternal”. Just change the name to Standard if Eternal is too psychologically indicating.
In the end, the new content still could scale the same. They might be done after a few hours but why would you care about that if it didn’t affect the game on a “bloat” level.
Thats a lot of demands in one post…
i agree, season is the worse thing human brain ever conceived for video gaming industry.
i hate it so much.
I think they should put the seasonal content but not the battle pass and associated cosmetics on Eternal. There’s no reason players shouldn’t have access to the quest line and buff on a level 100 if they want to. Right now Eternal is basically irrelevant.