Blizzard is a business

Just play Diablo 2, Diablo 4 is a scam I’d refund if I could.

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Like I said earlier. It is just business and in business being amoral = win.

Doesn’t actually mean that more people need to just “accept it” though. Plenty already do. And that’s why it works on them.

i try to but every time i run into duriel he’s just a gigantic brick wall.

Skill issue.

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Your facts are solid but the premise isn’t accurate. It’s the tail that wags the dog.

What I mean is it is a lot more complicated than people make it out to be when they try to argue decisions are made entirely based on money. It’s a circular argument. You can’t make money if you don’t have customers. You won’t have customers if you don’t have a product they want and are willing to pay for. You won’t have a product they are willing to pay for unless what you provide is of value to them.

The goal in business is walking that fine line between:

  • Appealing to everyone who is interested in the type of product you are making.
  • Offering a quality product with a higher cost to produce and higher net profit that cuts out consumers but also maximizes profits.

You can’t maximize profits if no one is willing to sell your products.

Screaming on the forums - is not going to get changes made. The loudest people often are still buying your product their just complainingn.

The people they care about are those who stop paying and don’t return or the consumers who don’t buy ever and are turned away based on public perception.

If your already paying and you continue to pay your voice is encouraging a business to do what they are currently doing whatever that is.

Honestly, I don’t blame them.

If I do something for low effort and I make a lot of money for it, I literally have zero incentive to put in more effort.

It is 100% the consumer’s fault. Every single person that buys a ridiculously over priced max level character. (when leveling takes like five hours anyways). Like you can buy breath of the wild, a game of the year game, for less than the cost of a max level character in wow. Or the person who spends money on some dumb item in the shop is telling blizzard they will make way, way more money with these zero-effort services and art design.

It is what it is, I’m just here to point out the obvious truth lol.

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Oh I don’t blame them either. I respect the hustle to a great degree. They’ve got people by the short n curlies and they know it.

In 20 years the only thing I’ve paid for above my sub fee was some faction changes thinking I’d give Alliance a shot and unlock their AR’s by xferring mine.

I’ve got the AR’s but just reversed the faction change later on. So it’s a point of regret for me that I even gave them that much extra.

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lol, exact same. Server transfers and faction changes.

The most ingenious, terrible beginning of extracting more and more money from the playerbase. And it’s 100% our fault. Not theirs

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If they make a game that customers think is bad because they have done faulty research or their vision of the future of wow is not something paying customers want to pay for, they lose money. Profits go down when people decide that it’s more fun to do housework than the present iteration of The Grind™.

All these “examples” you cite come with a risk that pushing the customer too far will push them over the edge and out of the game. Yes, they want to make more money. Turning long-time continuous subscribers into cyclical subscribers who may buy the game but never be regular subscribers again is a chance they have taken and lost at repeatedly.

If you’re willing to take the chance on driving away players who will be turned off by blatantly mercenary tactics while trying to push others as far as you can without burning them out, you’ve already given up on your future. If you’ve designed a game that is not fun, why expect people to stick around and pretend to be entertained?

This is a non sequitur. If they don’t make good games that customers want, they will not make money.

If they existed PURELY to make money, they would be an investment company, not a game developer.

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Yeah you can’t really attack their morality on a lot of this stuff when people literally asked them for it. Character services were asked for by the players before they were offered. The token was asked for by players before it was offered.

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It’s like you’re never heard of a mobile game

Yeah they finally got my number with that. Learned my lesson though. Blizz gets my sub fee for as long as I’m here and not a day longer.

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Absolutely.

I’d never blame these companies. They just wanna make money. It’s up to the consumer to dictate how and why that company makes money.

People will sit here in GD all day long complaining about the state of the game and then spend $20 on pixelated pajamas and have zero idea where it all went wrong :joy:

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Or complain about how Blizzard makes the grind longer to increase play time and extend subs, and then have their sub on auto renew for the full year. Like, you can’t complain about how it’s evil that they’re doing so, and then continue to pay them, and expect anything will change.

All of the changes made over the years are a direct response from Blizzard to what the player base is willing to pay for.

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That, FYI, is exactly how a mobile game works.

A mobile game is about the grind because the grind is the hamster wheel we run on to stay in the game.

If you can keep a customer on the hamster wheel but keep encouraging them to purchase stuff along the way, you’ve got them hooked.

And once they’ve spent that first $1, it’s all downhill from there.

What differentiates a good game from a bad game is whether that hamster wheel is worth running on. Of course, that’s subjective

“Blizz nerfed the frog farm and now my only option is to stay subbed until TWW comes out to get what they dangled in front of me to lure me in.”

Great recent example.

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I mean the frog farm was never an intended way to play this event, of course they were going to nerf it. No one should be surprised.

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Sadly the days of a bunch of geeks out in the garage writing games for the fun of it and any money they made was incidental is long gone. No more Pong or Kingdom of Kroz

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