They are… much more. Their financials are public record.
I mean…yeah? One store mount purchase is nearly the same amount as 2 months of subscription revenue from that same person. If they bought said mount with gold, it’s even more lol.
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Sure but that ain’t news. Micro transactions have been here to stay more than ten years ago. Mobile gaming has made bank for a long time.
I don’t know which rock you’ve been hiding under, but microtransactions have been a thing for over a decade.
Even pay-to-play games like Tales of Arise has them.
So yes, microtransactions are here to stay, even if Diablo Immortal didn’t exist.
The issue brought up is one of legality. They are abusing a gambling addiction problem in favor of profits, with people having reportedly spent 10,000+$ on the game.
This, strictly speaking, is illegal in many countries (i.e. Belgium and Denmark, which D:I is currently banned in), and should be illegal in all countries, but Blizzard played on the legal aspect of “what is a lootbox?” by making the lootbox happen after a Rift run, thus convoluting the definition of gambling in their game.
But make no mistake, D:I will be classified as gambling marketed to children and be banned, at least in Europe. In US, I’m not sure.
I seriously hope you’re not surprised that this model is successful. If it wasn’t, developers/studios wouldn’t use it.
You also muddle your message when you compare the monetization in F2P games, which tends to include basic aspects of the game itself (like access to characters, gear, and abilities, levels/stages/maps, etc), to microtransactions like those in WoW…which are exclusively cosmetic stuff.
Sadly true. And people will spend thousands to create videos complaining about it, thinking it does something. When companies don’t care because that money still spends.
Most of those reports so far have been streamers.
at least they show them going look look!..the evidence is there.
they are missing streamers pay often. its an investment.
they spend the cash. players watch them as they do more. Most will not watch streamer x do the same thing they do. farm crap for 20 hours. we know how that goes already.
more hits, more money. So that 10K they put out gets them paid 30K off hits and such.
30 - 10…20K profit. I say again…profit.
Streamers work of it takes money to make money. See zack scott. see zack scot have streams of mobile games he has paid lots of money to get all the store items to drive content to show in clips.
See zack scott get lots and lots of money and fame from this. PLants vs zombies to name a few…youtube will find his name real fast. now he does have some skill here. Not taking that away from him. But yeah…people watched him for years in PvZ since if $300 in new plants came out…he had them as soon as in the store. And thus…many 1 million+ hit videos were born.
I have never seen financial records that are specific to World of Warcraft and not lumped in with other games. Obviously Blizzard as a whole makes far more money than back then since they have new games that didn’t exist back then. Have a link you can share to WoW specific financials? That would be super interesting
Thank your Streamer community for advertising that spending a lot of money on a scam is cool and fun.
Fun fact, Diablo Immortal isn’t actually banned in either country. Blizzard chose not to release the game in those countries ‘officially’. You can still play the game if you are a resident of either, you just have to use a VPN to be able to download the game from the google or apple stores.
And even if they did decide to release the game there officially, only Belgium would kick them to the curb. Blizzard could easily release the game in the Netherlands by applying for a gaming license.
LOL. Yeah, they really showed everybody how horrible Blizz is by spending all that money. I doubt Blizz learned any valuable from it…other than D:I’s monetary system is very effective
Microtransactions are indeed here to stay.
And it is why I fear that ‘gaming’ is a hobby I will have to put on the shelf in a few years. Most game studios eventually fall into the pitfall of microtransactions, because IT IS extremely profitable. The downside is that it eventually hits the quality of the game itself.
It happened to World of Warcraft, as far as I am concerned. With the ingame store getting bigger, the quality of the game decreased. World of Warcraft for me, has largely been put on the shelf. I own the game all the way up till Battle for Azeroth, and I do not intend to buy any expansions beyond that.
Final Fantasy XIV is another game that I will have to put on the shelf, because I have noted the trend of offering less variety of armour in game, while the store grew bigger.
It is not the fault of the developers, it is just business. Microtransactions sells, but they only sell if players are given an incentive to buy, and players are given icentive to buy by simply creating a demand in game. Yes, it also affects cosmetics and therefor cosmetics only stores are equally bad to pay-to-win stores.
Beyond government regulation, there is not much we can do about it anylonger. Many people have warned against it over the years, for many years in fact, but their warnings fell upon deaf ears and now we are here. It is a shame that people will have to cry out for government intervention now.
The government is never going to intervene on MTX.
They may step in on things like loot boxes, but your average MTX system that involves cosmetics or even pay to win elements? They aren’t going to touch that.
As for games being a hobby. Games as a hobby will always be a thing, unless you personally choose to turn it into something else by streaming or creating review style content for games. But if you don’t choose to do that, then it will always be considered a hobby.