Now I’ve been told that most games do this for budgetary reasons, so then why didn’t Blizzard do it?
Isn’t the point of the company to make as much money as possible? So then by doing things to cut corners and save as much money as possible, why didn’t Blizzard gender-lock their classes as well? Wouldn’t, by using the same logic for say BDO or other games that do this, it make more sense for Blizzard to do this based on how much money it saves?
South Korean MMOs are usually the ones that are obnoxiously notorious for doing this. I’ve heard about the money-saving excuse for it, but it backfires because I always hear players refusing to play such games from that country because of the gender-locking being one of the reasons (on top of sometimes having exclusive male/exclusive female classes, a race that looks uncomfortably young, and them highly stereotyping gender roles):
Such restrictions won’t fly here in the west, as players here want more options and wishes to break any social norms in real life and the fantasy setting. So any thoughts about saving money from it may not even work.
We can see how Blizz is now trying to make more classes available to more races while trying to come up with a lore-friendly reason for doing so.