Hey it’s not like D.I was Raid: Shadow legends. It costs resources everytime you want to change a character’s gear in that game. It’s ridiculous. As far as bad mobile games go, D.I. definitely isn’t among the worse. (And at least it’s an actual game, it doesn’t play itself.)
Weird to ask if you don’t care about it lol.
Raid: Shadow Legends only purpose in life is to infest youtube videos so that content creators can earn a little bit of funding for their work. It being a game (I use the word game here extremely loosely here.) is, irrelevant.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Even if I wasn’t a fan of Diablo, I would still compare it to the worst of them. There is nothing good to say about gacha games.
I see you have not activated the footprints to make the game take your character to the next thing to do, automatically.
I asked so you can defend your point. I care more about your opinion, not Fans.
I remember reading about this.
Ironically, their publicity is pretty good. I love the death knights videos.
That’s pretty far from having your characters fight by themselves while you make dinner.
But they’re not my points. I just relayed information from a Blizzard employee. If you’re interested in what he had to say on the matter. He said D.I. was never a game that was supposed to be P2W, and that it wasn’t something the company wanted to push. That’s why I started playing the game myself, to see exactly what’s what. Since I almost never spend in this type of game, I should be able to easily see if there’s a paid requirement.
(Though, I’ve never done Diablo PvP, so, paid advantage or not, I’d probably get destroyed by people who know what they’re doing.)
That is very true.
This is also very true.
Well, Fans impressions are premature at best because he got an early version of the game without P2W mechanics. I also think his assertion that P2W wasn’t what Blizz wanted to push is a load of mastodon dung.
Just like other gacha games, they give you some stuff for free to hook you in, then you will eventually hit a paywall, or a slow grind to essentially make you want to pay.
Free to play players also complain about the paywall and the slow grind. Yes, you can enjoy the story, (whatever it is), and hope that this is all you will want to do in the game. PVP, you need to be rich.
Keep in mind, Fabien no longer worked for Blizzard at the time of the interview. So he has no reason to protect them.
Though personally, I think PvP in any mobile game is bound to be an unbalanced mess. I remember the days of Marvel Alliance.
This may be true, though I find it hard to believe especially with the long track record of Blizz trying to make a quick buck.
That was not the point of the playerbase.
As the summary stated the players waited for the new Diablo on PC and got no information about it. And then on the big event -only- a mobile game was shown and discussed.
They didn’t even mention or discuss Diablo IV when the crowd asked questions about the future of Diablo on PC => “Do you guys not have phones”
The people holding the presentation are not to blame. But the organizers and management failed hard.
Would they have mentioned before that Diablo IV for the PC is in the making with a short teaser, the story would have been completely different.
It has nothing to do with dev team size, but how the games were constructed. WoW has a monthly subscription, expansions, and an in-game shop. Hots used to have an in game purchasables, and still kind of do through boosts, everything (except maybe some limited time items and boosts) are available through everyone through gold and loot boxes.
I think this guy is full of it. Its no wonder why hots makes less money than wow… it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.
Yeah well when WoW makes a lot more money to start, and has a smaller dev team of course its going to be a more efficient cash cow than hots. I guess they needed a larger dev team for balancing since they never seemed to get it right on the first try and took a while to change a heroes overtuned values or whatever. Did they really expect a free to play game to beat WoW in profit when they had a larger dev team to pay out vs WoW? Yeah makes sense to me.
This is the major problem with gaming as a whole. Not only Blizzard, but many game companies stopped releasing complete games at launch. Seems like they learned something from Andrew Tate’s business model of “sell first, then create the product”. They announced a game which would be a nice refresh of WC3. They promised things they didn’t ever come through with even after release. They just collected pre-order money and released what they had. Its scummy.
World first already downed. Now the pros will complain about no new content the next 3 months.
What do you mean? The people whose job it is to maximize profits look at things in terms of numbers. Cost vs profit has make sense to them. When it doesn’t, things get cut. Most of the HotS devs were sent to D4, some to WoW. So they sent them in places they thought should be prioritised.
It’s not just that it made less money. It’s why do we pay triple the salaries for a game that makes less than half the money ? If I had been charged with optimizing profits, I’d have raised an eyebrow to that too.
No, the reason the team was so large (They had their own building and over 100 devs) was because the goal of HotS was to catchup with LoL and compete with it. They went about it in a horrible way. But at least a large team made sense in the first few years.
If you want to have as many chars and skins as LoL, you need a lot of people.
This is correct but it could be still logical to do it. For example if you have a business case over a longer period of time. Especially in the tech industry there are a lot of companies who don’t make profit, all the money is re-invested.
I mean look at LoL, it’s outperforming WoW since a long time in each number you can look at. So either the business case ran out of time or they didn’t believe in what they have to offer - HOTS.
Interesting. But something’s bothering me about this:
If this is the case, why did the downsizing happen in the first place? 
Because the HotS dev team was too large in proportion to the return.
Exactly, so why even assign more devs to a project that by design is not meant to make as much as WoW? So when I mean he’s full of it, I mean that its fairly obvious why hots didn’t make as much money as WoW, despite having a larger team so him saying people wonder, is bogus. The product itself wasn’t meant to outperform WoW in profit so why should it? Now if people expected it to… that’s another issue.
Yes I agree. However if they expected hots to, and assigned a larger team because of their expectations, that’s on them. You can’t expect a free to play game to outperform a pay to play game. Not saying a free to play game can’t be more profitable, but it shouldn’t be the expectation.
Its their own fault and it all comes down to their own stupidity of hiring that many people for hots. Cutting employees is the only way to reduce expenditures since lowering salary is much more controversial.
LoL had a much longer lead in terms of hero releases. 5 years or so. Hots team could have been smaller, more profitible due to less of a paycheck expense, and taken things at a slower pace. I am sure that even though updates to the game would take longer, at least the expectations from the playerbase based off precedents wouldn’t be as high. If you release 14 heroes in a year, people will expect that every year. Now what if that was, say 8 or 10? The expectations would be around that and that will give the devs more time to work on things.
But as we know, at the end of the day people are going to complain no matter what…
Blizz went ~ 5 years without releasing new stuff. In previous years, they used to be able to release something about every year. As a publicly traded company, gamers aren’t the customer of concern for the head honchos, stock investors are. So to appease them, if numbers aren’t in a magically inflating bubble of perpetual success, then they cut costs and cook books to post investor reports that put a positive spin on things. HotS wasn’t the only thing hit with downsizing, but it was an easy target to scapegoat for costs: hgc, animations, heroes dorm, etc, easy stuff that has money going out, but nothing to really claim on the investor report on what the costs are doing.
(If anything, the lack of spinning HotS development into investor reports is probably the biggest issue for HotS than balance, or dev size, or not-moba-like design and balance)
The poor planning and cost-cut strategy made it easy to dogpile on blizz after a number of pr issues, and then the chain of lawsuits made the microsoft buyout a much needed answer to all the compounding problems as negative pr spooked someone into forcing HCG to cancel too soon in the first place and start the noticeable portion of the problematic spiral.
Not if they wanted to catch up with LoL in the timeline they were given. So they got a huge team and were chugging heroes every month. They just never adjusted things.
But why did they even need to catch up woth LoL instead of just take things at their own pace? They’re already behind because they didn’t start making a moba until way after 2009 anyway. They expected a game that is late to the genre to be as popular as an already established game and created a large team to fulfill that expectation. That doesn’t sound smart in terms of finances. They could have slown down the pace of the game and create a smaller team to start, and then add people as needed allowing those others to be put on other projects or whatever.
Hearing that the dev team for hots was the largest among all other dev teams at blizzard, yeah, I mean that is a pretty big part of the problem. The whole problem? No and not everything wrong with bliizard came from hots. I just think that a lot of things would have been better overall if they didn’t allocate so many devs to a project that wasn’t really meant to outsell other IP’s. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
That was the decision made when they decided to create HotS. “Let’s compete with LoL”
From all the play through videos I’ve watched regarding Diablo Immortal it would seem you first encounter a hard paywall around level 30 (Don’t quote me on this.) As I trust your opinion, I’d be curious to hear your impressions of DI as you progress.
I think what is worse is how many items and tokens you buy need to be used during a set period of time or they expire and there is often deliberate obfuscation with rift tokens that look like they offer the same benefits but don’t.
Regardless of what the original developers intended for Diablo Immortal, it was released with a P2W model at its core, with the Diablo name being dragged out to trade off it’s good reputation as means of cover for these problems.
I understand that mobile games are the way forward for many studios, but there wasn’t a need to create Diablo Immortal Raid Shadow Legends. If they wanted to trade off the Blizzard name, they could have taken a leaf from Hots and made a mobile dungeon crawler featuring classic Blizzard characters, rather than a dedicated IP like Diablo. It could be argued that Daiblo as an IP was already damaged from the days of the Real Money Auction House and the never released promised PVP mode.*
*Yes I know D3 eventually received the very small PVP battle arena, but it’s not what fans of D2 PVP were promised or expecting.
it varies; each server has an average player level, if people are above it, they get less xp and if they’re below it, they get more xp.
I only played in the first season — fifth now i think — so I don’t know if 30 is going to be consistent or that was the “wall” for players that were above their server level at the time