Diablo 4 sales have brought Blizzard more than $1 billion. About 15 percent of that amount came from microtransactions.
  • stardust@lemmy.caEnglish
    115·
    2 months ago

    Title is weird with how it could be interpreted to mean mtx was $1 billion.

    So for people who might be confused

    150 million dollars from in-game microtransactions.

      • Comment105@lemm.eeEnglish
        12·
        2 months ago

        I agree.

        I’ll add there’s apparently no point to a degree in it because it seems even the ones who have one learned nothing.

    • rickyrigatoni@lemm.eeEnglish
      19·
      2 months ago

      All those macrotransactions (because a horse skin that costs more than the game is not micro) just for it to only make up 15% of the revenue.

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I never really described myself as a Gamer, but I wouldn’t deny it if someone called me one. Blizzard fans have made me describe myself as someone who plays games, but is not a Gamer™.

      I think the only “AAA” thing I’ll consider is the next Doom game, but fuck preordering. Dark Ages actually looks slow compared to what I look for now anyway.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      The game is pretty good as of now. Not great. Not something I’ll play for a long time. But def solid 30+ hours of action RPG.

      And absolutely not something where I’d spend any money on a fucking hat for my character.

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
      5·
      2 months ago

      Yeah. FOMO and nostalgia got me, and some people saying Blizzard definitely has learned… But D4 was the last straw for me.

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I barely got through the story on my first character. Every other Diablo, I did at least one full run in every class.

      • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Honestly I fell asleep playing the game… Twice.

        There’s just something that makes me so bored.

        • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          I’m right there with you. I won’t deny that there’s a chance that it’s just a side effect of being old, but I nodded off more than a few times.

          I can’t put my finger on it either, but everything just felt like a chore. I must quit playing it for months and only fired it up to finish the story because I knew I had to be close, and I couldn’t leave it like that.

          • Minnels@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Can’t say that I enjoyed the story but I think the game is in pretty good shape right now after a couple of seasons. If you like to just kill stuff at least.

    • Delphia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Maybe thats why they sold so many microtransactions. “Surely if I spend another $10 it wont be shit”

    • etchinghillside@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Bought at %50 off and still don’t think I’ve gotten value out of it. And then kind of feels bad that I won’t really be able to go back to it after the next expansion because I feel the base game will then be obsolete without it.

  • demizerone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    It’s like that COD MW2 boycott on steam back in 2009. This is why things are the way they are, people will pay if they are entertained.

  • Professorozone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    2 months ago

    I don’t understand. I play Diablo 4 all of the time and I’ve never had a microtransaction. I’ve had a macro one because that game cost like $70 when I bought it, but nothing after that. Why do people do that?

  • gila@lemm.eeEnglish
    81·
    2 months ago

    My experience: I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector’s edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector’s edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn’t login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.

    I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector’s edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard’s dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn’t feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.

    I’ve played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It’s not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren’t substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.

    I’m left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they’re evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn’t even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.

    tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard’s MTX sales than he’s done to generate them

    • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      My brother plays a lot of D4 himself and even though he does spend money on the game for the battle passes (I think), he never bought skins because he feels the same way you do: your characters look less like they’re your own because the armour you equip is not visible. Then again, I’m wondering what else they could sell that isn’t cosmetics. Change the way spells look maybe?

      • gila@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.

        Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.

        • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Shortcuts in the way that WoW handles it, ie. instant leveling, or literal shortcuts like waypoints on map? Afaik, both exist, right? At least you can skip the campaign.

          And would including power in some way not lead to P2W?

          I guess it depends how aggressive your monetisation is. I feel like Blizzard was super greedy already, looking at Overwatch’s 20€ skins, but studios like Riot sure don’t make it more realistic for mtx to become cheaper in the future. People seem to be fine paying 20€ for a single equipment transmog for some reason.

          • gila@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.

            You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.

            Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.

            Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!

  • filister@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    And thinking that the majority of the players who spent those money are not earning their own money, it’s just sad. Same bullshit like NFT.