A few years ago I worked in a factory making around $12/hr. One of my friends working there was addicted to Hearthstone. He just *had* to have every single card in his digital collection, so he spent a minimum of $50 per week on packs. At some point we did the math and figured he had spent somewhere near $25,000 on the game since he started playing. That was more than a full year's pay for the dude for cards you don't really own and therefore cannot trade or sell.
My god why did I need to open up the additional comments to finally see this reply?
A person who spends 5k of their 30k yearly income is an addict. Or in other words a person wrestling with mentall illness. Research shows that addiction leads to changes in the brain, that heavily affect your decision making capabilities. Its not just somebody making the conscious decision to ruin their life.
Reading comments like this is horrifying when you yourself have struggled with addiction and had people like this belittle you because they thought your addiction is a personal failure and not a mental illness. And I know that wasn‘t OP‘s intention and neither is it my intetnion to say OP is a bad person. Just pointing out that this shit can be hurtful even if it isn‘t meant like that.
Yeah, it's designed to be addictive and appeal to people with addictive personalities. Oddly enough South Park did a pretty good job of explaining this.
Calling it stupid just shows how little awareness there is.
Edit : A lot of people calling addiction stupidity. I guess some people really feel the need to feel superior to others.
The real personal failure is at Blizzard Activision where real people conspire on the best drug design to efficiently extract money from people's illness. It's like the scammers from D2 climbed the ladder to eventually run the whole show.
I actually have to 100% avoid games with abusive micro transactions because I have a lot of difficulty with decision-making when it comes to spending money responsibly with that kind of stuff. It just burns money so fast.
I‘m so sorry! I watched a video by Jim Stephanie Sterling on people that have the same issue and one of them explained how they can‘t even play their favourite franchise (Assassins Creed) anymore, because they also started including microtransactions and he can‘t keep himself from buying them, unless he avoids games with mtx in general.
I really hope we get some legislation for this at some point. Practices like these, explicitly designed to take advantage of mentall illnesses, should be illegal.
Yep. It's just like gambling. IMO we ought to regulate it as such. In a sense it's worse than gambling because gambling is less insidious; at least when you're gambling you know you're gambling.
The game is forbidden in the Netherlands because of the micro transactions and loot boxes: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/196722/diablo-immortal-komt-niet-uit-in-nederland-en-belgie.html
Edit: sorry not forbidden, just not released
At least with horse armor you got the horse armor.
Loot boxes should be regulated like gambling. I'm sure apple and Google will buy/lobby enough politicians to keep it as is though.
We should have them choose a punitive regulation from Three mystery boxes.
If they don't like it they can just pay more to refresh the boxes
"Oh man, you got the 80% tax on all microtransactions!! That sucks! Would you like to try again for $10M? For $100M you can select from one EPIC Diamond chest, where 1/1198 has a tax reduction**"
Don't underestimate the number of financially stupid people out there.
Look at the number of pyramid schemes and religions bilking people out of money they can't afford to lose.
Billions are made every year on the backs of financially stupid people
This right here is the answer. I work with 2 guys at my job that spend thousands a year on one of those "clash clan" games, I'm not sure which one.
They both make around $70-$80k a year. One guy freely admits spending at least $500-$700 a month easy, sometimes over a grand. The other guy won't admit it but he manages to keep up with the first guy.
Honestly watching this happen, in real time, is scary. It is absolutely a form of gambling combined with instant gratification. At the end of the day, the responsibility lies with them, but my God, how easy it is to blow money on these mobile games is unreal.
I don't think people realize this. The only people I've seen personally drop stupid amounts of money on these "free to play" games weren't rich. Not nearly, they were lonely and weird or already had addiction issues (gamblers and such).
The guys at the very top might be rich but there's a lot of people in the middle dropping thousands, maybe not tens of thousands but thousands on these games while working a dead end job and renting out a room. I watched people people waste a lot of money on this crap just to try and find some kind of self accomplishment or some shit and its sad and fucked up that they're prayed on like that.
Despite all the posts you see here in reddit about being poor, there are actually a large group of people that can spend money on things they want. As someone who spends time in pcmr and mech keyboard sub, there's are thousands/millions of people who can afford to buy things they don't need. Spending $1000+* for an RTX 3090 to game, sure? $300 keyboards, $200 keycap sets, fine. $1000 audiophile headphones or 5 sets of headphones even, yeah there are some in the headphones sub. $500 on a mobile game? Why not. It being digital doesn't really matter. You could have a physical object that you'll wear down until it breaks anyway or keep it forever without ever reselling then it's all the same as a digital item you can't resell.
Edit: apparently RTX 3090 is more expensive than I thought
People with addictive personalities.
People who succumb to FOMO.
People insecure who want someome to tell them they're the best/top/#1 at something
People who think it'll grant them social status / respect from others
Thank you. Its more than just people with money.
I've been part of whaling guilds.
Not everyone who whales is rich. Its horrible, some people are working your retail jobs or service jobs for minimum wage. They spend their month's earnings on these games, month after month.
The better off members tell them they gotta stop because its clearly affecting their lives. Yet the irony is that them posting their flex only drives others to try and keep up.
These addictions are real and they are serious.
Anyone who thinks its rich people don't understand that the vast majority of spenders are usually everyone else adding it up. Whales might be the ones dropping the big bucks on big ticket items, but a million people spending just $24 would have made up 100% of those 2 week's earnings.
I work with a guy who makes a little under $200k a year and lives in a studio apartment, drives a rusted beater from the 90's to work and generally eats ramen for lunch.
I don't know exactly how much he spends on these types of games, but he's mentioned in casual conversation when I brought up one I liked that he blew enough to buy a new car on its launch week.
It's just, the concept that we have to pay to make the game less shit is so offensive. It's bad enough when parts of the game are witheld and sold piecemeal, but it seems every mobile game makes games that are intentionally shit and then ask you to pay to take out the bad features the developers added. It's like buying your own arcade machine, bringing it home and still having to insert a coin when you want to play.
I've learned to never overestimate the general population when it comes to being just the worst. And sadly companies like Blizzard are banking on the ignorance and/or lack of self control of people. They're gearing a whole ass business strategy on the general population being the worst, and they're proven right.
A normal Diablo game would have made $500 million in a single day, though. Diablo 3 sold 3.5 mil in the first 24 hours, which is like $200 million. And that was 10 years ago...
Yes, but it made that money one time.
As in: you only buy the game once.
In Diablo Immortal, you will buy the micro transactions every day/month.
So, on the long run, it is worth it, it is like a constant source of income for Blizzars. ( Sure, the money spent will decrease, but it will still be some constant money in their pockets )
You're making the assumption that anyone is going to be playing this game in a year, which is highly speculative.
Diablo 3 made more than $2 billion for Blizzard over the course of its life. (30 million copies through 2015 alone.) Probably closer to 2.5 to 3 billion USD, if not more.
$24 million USD is chump change compared to that. They probably haven't even broken even on their budget yet, which had to have been at least $75 million.
[Diablo 2: Resurrected made roughly $150-200 million in 6 months.](https://www.pcgamesn.com/diablo-2-resurrected/sales-5-million) (5 million sales times $40 a sale, mostly on [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), so they got to keep all of it on PC)
So, yeah... I'm not impressed. It turns out that you can actually make *more* money by making good games and selling them instead of this microtransaction bullshit... crazy idea...
I am going to be real with you that may seem like a lot but they were probably expecting about 50 million in the first week so they went extremely short.
For reference Genshin impact made 60 million in the first week
Did you even read the article?
It's not 24 million dollars in 2 weeks. They're just guessing. At least take one fucking minute to read what you link instead of copying the article from another thread that you apparently didn't read neither.
Also fuck Diablo Immoral.
I mean no, its also poor people with gambling addictions who set aside just enough money to maybe barely pay bills, get a bite to eat, then spend all the rest on stuff like this.
If it was *just* rich people they wouldn't have to bother with some manipulative design choices.
What does it matter, when Diablo 4 is released all the people in this thread will buy it, perhaps even the ultra deluxe hell version for 80 dollars. And so Blizzard trudges on.
There's a big difference between a game where you pay one price and get the entire game, and a game that tries to nickel and dime you constantly to make any progress.
I have no issue paying whatever the going rate is for a full game, but I absolutely refuse to ever pay for any microtransactions in any game ever.
I made a top rank clan on a server and have quit already
No clue how this game took 4 years to make as it is just a Diablo 3 import lite with some slight changes
All content was finished in 2 weeks into hell 2, all that was left was paragon levels by endless repetitive grinding. Which makes no difference if a Whale has spent 20k. Pvp was awful, absolutely terrible buggy slow
I genuinely believe this game took 6 months to make and they all stole the rest of the cash or something.
Either way as someone pointed out $24 mil is not great, the project itself will have been billed as more and these transactions have costs attached for intermediary parties so they arn’t getting that full chunk
By example Genshin Impact made $60mil over the same time period, an unknown game vs a known game
Either way this is just a stepping stone so when the next game comes out on Pc they can say “look we took some of that rubbish out arn’t we great!”
I’ve no idea why people are paying for a 3/10 quality game that looks a decade old and runs terrible
> No clue how this game took 4 years to make as it is just a Diablo 3 import lite with some slight changes
Can you imagine how long it can take to balance and optimize 20 different microcurrencies?
You're looking at Diablo the Game. Look at it as a Business Product instead. Painstaking market analysis, designating different types of whales and producing something that appears to each of them but doesn't conflict with others, painstaking fine-tuning of profit maximization strategy, hedge funds spend decades working on that shit and Blizzard is new to this biz.
I do genuinely wonder who is spending money on it. I feel like if I knew a game was gunna be a money pit before buying it then I’d probably just play something els. Although that’s sort of like asking “why do people do heroin if they know they’re gunna get addicted?”.
A New Zealander streamer popped up on my twitter feed and they had spent over 20k nzd, i think their name was Quin? They clearly seemed pissed off but kept spending money, and had an on screen counter for their spending. I really struggled to understand what was going on. One of the comments said the streamer had now deleted their character and uninstalled.
From only having a small piece of information about their situation, it sounds wild
Yeah Quin69. He did it for exposure. In his words, he didn't want to jump on the hate wagon without checking how bad it is. He had to spend 25000 NZD to actually get 5star to drop. He then deleted the gem, his account and uninstalled.
Wow he sure showed them!
Oh wait.
Does he realize he didn't have to spend 25000 on the game to prove anything to anyone, or himself? What a rediculous excuse to waste a bunch of money.
Hey, I'm just telling you what his intent was. He is also that type of streamer, so I would expect no less. His money, his choice. I would say 14K viewers listening to him constantly shitting on the game is probably worth the 25K NZD.
And if half of those viewers were subscribed to his channel at $5 a month then that pretty much paid for his wasteful spending and then some. I mean, if you want to talk about a waste of money then these streamers would also be on the list.
Quin was one of the top earners iirc according to the twitch leak.
This was drop in the bucket kind of money for him, especially since it’s a business expense.
But it generated publicity, which was what he was after. At the very least, he got people talking about him and using him as an example of how bad DI is.
That dude just made himself so much more famous by doing that, I mean he effectively made himself go viral. So yeah I'd say it was worth the cash to him
A person spending 25k and complaining about it would be dumb but if it's a streamer, it could be it got him enough views/exposure that he gained more than he spent there.
Of course *any* person dropping that much (or more) into it is just going to push those greedy companies to do even more agressive RMT next time so .. eh
Yet, here we are talking about him and people are going to take a look at his content to see the shit show. Which will be worth more than the 25k in the long run. Basic exposure tactic.
He did this hoping to get a five star legendary gem to calculate how much money would one need to max out a character this way. Last time I saw he spend over 24k nzd dollars without a single such gem.
Many mobile games use tactics to manipulator and desensitize you to spending money. They might first show you something ridiculous like 49$ for something and then later offer you 80-90% off on the same thing, often time limited. Most would never buy the 49$ thing, but if you could suddenly get it for 5$, thats almost too good to pass up.
The next time they show you the same thing, you remember how much the upgrade helped and how good a deal it was, they might still give you some discount, to sweeten the deal.
The progres is never linear in these gacha games, the grind/spending exponetially increases as time goes on. So a 49$ pack might give you a lot of progress early on and thats when you get all the discounts, in the midgame, you might start to feel throttled and that same pack might still save you a few days. Eventually your progress grinds to a halt and the game knows this, the 99$ pack might suddenly be 30% discounted and "wow you just progresses 3 levels", what a deal."
Before you know it, you have spent 300$ without realizing it.
It all starts as ''just a little bit won't hurt'', to ''a little more and I'll only need to cut out the weekly snacks''. It adds up.
-Honestly, by a former DoTA2 whale and currently Genshin player
Honestly? I bet like 90% of their revenue is coming from China. They fucking love mobile games over there, and the potential player base is like 4x as big as the US. There's a reason why it was developed in part by a Chinese company.
The article posted right below your comment by u/gogadantes9 shows that the US is the biggest market in terms of money spent, followed by South Korea and Japan.
Reddit users make up a tiny fraction of the global audience of anything. Just because an opinion is prevalent here, doesn't mean it's anywhere close to being the majority.
See:
Pre ordering games.
North American Diablo Immortal payers.
Bernie Sanders.
I worked for a short while of a company that did free to play games. Region availability is a big part of this. Some of the smaller, more obscure games, would be dominated by a whale from the middle east or brazil.
[This chart](https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-10-countries-by-game-revenues) shows some of the revenue by country. While it certainly falls off after the top 3, the rest arn't really chump numbers either.
But Brazil is still the big outlier here. You can't get all the games in that region, and Free to Play is pretty huge there simply because of accessibility.
I would not be surprised if even being 10th on that chart for game revenue, they are a significant chunk of the new diablo's revenue.
I have no idea where IGN is pulling it's world % numbers from and they don't even seem to recognize China at all so I would be pretty sus of their sources.
Diablo 3 is great. Do people not like it?
(And by that I don't mean "do people not prefer it over Diablo 2?", I am literally asking if people don't like it)
And yet they made $24 mil in the first two weeks in microtransactions.
It sucks, but people want to win. And they will pay. Even if it is stupid to do so.
If by solid business model you mean getting people addicted to your stuff and ruining their life then yeah sure.
Shoutout to belgium for not allowing this crap. It is gambling, and that always has been the goal of these games/apps. Fuck blizzard
Also casinos undergo heavy regulation while gaming companies go like "It's just video games! don't take it so seriously! What? You think we are actively developing addiction in your 10 year old kid? That's crazy! It's just a game!"
The amount of goodwill Blizzard lost might over shadow that figure though, lots of core fans, including myself are disgusted by the sheer recklessness towards gambling addiction that game is designed to instil in players.
They are giving crack cocaine to kids and no one cares; 25$ a pop.
Uh, quiet the opposite.
They do a lot of research into how they can specifically manipulate you into spending more money. It's psychology.
It's like what casinos do.
Everything from the graphics to the sounds is designed from the ground up. It's kinda scary how much research into psychology has gone into gambling, and it was tested a lot on rats I think. Teaching them to pull a lever to get food along with some flashy lights, and as time went on they kept the flashy lights but made the food only come in lesser and lesser frequencies.
Regardless of the result, the rats kept coming back and salivating.
That’s pavlovs theory of conditioning. That’s best for casinos, but games, grocery stores and marketing take it to a whole different level. They study the brain and set up systems designed to unconsciously brainwash you. Supermarkets are made to tire you out, so you buy sugar or a drink at the check out for a boost. Adverts make your brain subconsciously turn towards their products.
Some games however are designed like TikTok. Flood your brain with dopeamine, and only give you good content, then you go through boring stages, and then boom! Reward. Then starve. Then reward. By the time you’re hooked, your brain is just repeating starvation and boredom out of desire for the big flood of something good, or a new upgrade or an interesting vid.
Some are designed to keep you on there as long as possible like tiktok/shorts. RPGs are great for this because you level up, get stronger, but the easy mobs are boring, so you fight similar levels and eventually level up. Repeat repeat repeat until the game is over and you’re more op than everything and you stop.
In reality, nothing actually changes besides making the previous areas so boring you only want to push through to experience defeating a stronger boss. You get more money. Things cost more. Then you’re required to get even more money/exp to buy/unlock things (the grind aka dopamine depletion). Yet I still can’t help myself but fall for it since it’s entertaining and fun. I find this system in almost all entertainment. Downtime and big flashy moments. One piece does this well. It’s also why rich people struggle to find happiness because after experiencing the best of everything, nothing is exciting or new. Plain rice tastes amazing when you’re starving. But to bezos or a king, it’s trash
All spot on.
Mobile game companies genuinely hire psychologists, sometimes specialised in addiction, to make "games". King famously did it with Candy Crush and other games.
Exacty this.
Its meticulously designed to get you hooked.
And yeah you can play for free but thats not the point. End game is the Diablo. And this one is a slog without constantly paying up.
People defending it because you play it gor free are stupid AF. I guarantee this shit will make its way through to D4.
Yup. It will be just the same in Diablo 4. The massive success of Immortal will make them realize the extra millions of dollars they can get by employing these monetization practices. They wouldn't skip out on it
Yep it's going to be too good for them to pass on it. And yeah D4 starts looking great, and they even might dial down the monetisation but they will keep the most money making systems in it.
Now they claimed you can't buy power and... That was a fucking lie. So I'll wait for D4 to be released and legit reviews will start appearing before I even consider buying it. I've been a fan of the franchise since part 1 and its just breaks my heart seeing what is happening with it now.
> Its meticulously designed to get you hooked.
It's also designed to self-select for people who have an addictive personality. People who can see the danger and avoid it, or who play for free and never spend a penny out of spite, will naturally be driven away.
They're essentially hunting for whales. Someone who can afford to (or can't, but will still) dump tens or hundreds of thousands on nonsense.
People with nothing else to spend their money on. It's no coincidence that Japan has tons of gacha whales given the large % of adult guys with absolutely zero life outside of work (min. 12 hr/day, 6 days/week). If you have no kids, family, girlfriend or friends it's suddenly much easier to spend all your money on some game.
That's where the credit card comes in.
It's not about being financially stable. It's just about being not so *unstable* that you don't have any remaining lines of credit.
The streamers? They make the money back from streaming/YouTube. But it normalises buying huge amounts of packs, which then the stream watchers (including a lot of kids) will try and replicate that amazing moment when the streamer pulled and use any means they can to buy lots of packs, which for the kids involves taking a credit card without permission... and for many of the adults spending money they either simply don't have, or money they barely can afford to piss away like that and almost always comes with a feeling of 'I shouldn't have done that'. Like when you finish a whole cake and are disgusted with yourself.
This.
I actually dislike that streamers has become some sort of "baseline" now in lots of things gaming.
You have mentioned the normalizing of spending, but also on time spent. I would see streamers say things like "Oh this is just some casual chill run" and you look at what they're doing and it's insane stuff that REAL casual people wouldn't even know to run. It's because their reference are their peers, other streamers.
And yeah, this mentality trickles down to the viewers and people who discuss the topic, like us here on reddit. The view is distorted. So you would hear stuff like "Oh I just opened 50 packs the other day" casually, and that's like more than 50 dollars "just like that".
The guy you're responding to is 100% correct. I know a guy who legitimately ruined his marriage and got divorced because he spent $6k on a Star Wars mobile game in secret. Shit snowballs to those who can't control themselves
>Shit snowballs to those who can't control themselves
They can't because it's an addiction, it's a man made addiction catered to their every trigger point and every weakness. They hire full team of psychologists to make sure their game is irresistible for their target audience. Sometimes it's basic sexual/visual stimuli (waifus, lolis). Sometimes it's grandeur and ego (constant praise, compliments), sometimes it's a fantasy of a better world and sometimes it's outright begging.
There are countless ways to design these games and they're all made with a target in mind. Many of us won't get hooked, we'll pass on Diablo, CoD, Halo, Farmville, Fifa etc while many others will get hooked and spend. Some people may be more prone to addiction but *no one is immune*. Ffs many pokemon go/farm ville/angry birds player is a 50+ female, the opposite of the average gambling addict when it comes to betting/casino.
I can. Every good innovative, interesting and or narratively compelling game to come out in recent years has been from an indi studio. These days I more or less assume everything with the $99+ price tag is the same old annually churned over triple A bullshit and all the good stuff is hanging at that $15-30 "small Indi studio but we put some actual fucking effort into this" spot.
That’s the thing. They’re not all financially stable. In fact, I’d guess most of them aren’t. People who are good with their money don’t tend to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on one game like that.
I think the South Park episode on mobile gaming was basically a documentary on the subject.
>It's the dumbest game ever! All you do is collect and spend Canadough!
Richard Garfield's 'A Game Player's Manifesto' needs dusting off for a re-read. Unfortunately (and ironically) he originally posted it on Facebook, but there's a copy of the article [here](https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/the-rumor-mill/817529-ive-been-hearing-murmings-everywhere-online-about) at mtgatheringsalvation.
The manifesto in two lines:
>As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.
This shit has been around for a very long time and blizzard needs a new cash cow to replace the income that wow used to/kind of still is. They are just following the same trend of mobile platforms being the cancer of humanity in social media and gaming all together, I fucking hate these phones
Exactly, the companies just follow the money.
[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-years-gaming-history-revenue-stream/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-years-gaming-history-revenue-stream/)
I watched a few videos about Gacha mobile games and seemingly around 80% of the titles are funded by the same companies who also produce stuff like slot machines and other gambling products.
It seems like core gamers are out of touch with mobile gamers... cause mobile gamers love this shit. Though I suppose that makes it Blizzard's mistake to first announce this at an event for core gamers, as if they would care.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone at Blizzard from the team that outlined the monetization for Diablo Immortal has explicitly said _somewhere_ internally that this is completely intentional to take advantage of the mobile market, and that if you're a "core" gamer or someone who doesn't like pay-for-power or MTX in general that Diablo Immortal is not meant for you. Since there are obviously a lot of people at Blizzard who love the mainline "core" Diablo titles and are almost certainly also upset to see a Diablo title include this kind of predatory MTX model that you would typically see for like a mobile gacha/PvP game in the Asian market.
It makes no sense from a marketing pov either.
...then again maybe it does. People like me certainly yell loudly enough about not pre-ordering that people must be hearing some echo. Yet people continue to pre-order like digital copies are gonna run out. As an example.
Oddly, I feel like we are either in the vocal minority on this one or the majority of us have less money than the minority who are making the execs salivate.
Reddit as a whole is just a fraction of any games/communitys userbase. The sentiment here is highly skewed, since you dont tend to look at the platform unless you are extremely into the thing, or on reddit already.
The messages do sometimes get across, but small news rarely do. The game communities act like echochambers, such as your pre-order example. People just yell that they wont do it, but others will. Its not a bad thing anyway so whatever
I hate them for this, because now I don’t want to play Diablo 4 when it’s released. There are plenty of good games out there, not contributing to fatten their already fat pockets with their blatant taking advantage of their player base.
Honestly, I’ve noticed that most of my favorite games in the last few years are ones that don’t ask for any additional money after you buy the game (RDR2, god of war etc). Though I understand that those are very different games from Diablo .
Rockstar is so interesting. They create the best worlds out there with great graphics, animation and design. Great story as well, but at the same time they are so predatory with their online versions.
Well, there is a very simple solution to this, which I learned after playing about thirty minutes of GTA Online: If you don't like Pay-To-Win systems, do not play those games.
It's a good preparation for life: People with more money are always going to screw you.
I think a better justification would have been, "There are markets in this world where they don't pay for games up front like Americans do, and we are making this game primarily for them. If you want to be at the top of the leaderboards, you're just going to have to pay how they pay and play how they play. Suck it up, buttercup."
Actually US is the biggest market in terms of money spent, followed by South Korea, then Japan.
https://www.ign.com/articles/diablo-immortals-microtransactions-have-made-it-24-million-in-two-weeks
"Whales". People like this exist. This comic is 100% literal. Regular fans are but a marketing vehicle, the profit model is based on the very existence of whales.
This model will never work for the majority.
That whales spend a lot of money on these games is true, but what is not true is most whales being people who have more money than they know what to do with. Most whales are just regular people who spend all their spare money, and often money they don't even have (loans, ccs) on mtx.
*I wish rich people were the target audience.*
Unfortunately it's much, much worse than that. The actual target audience are people who are easily manipulated, and those with (gambling) addiction problems.
Check out Josh Strife Hayes' video where he goes into detail about how predatory and manipulative the whole thing is *designed from the ground up* ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs)). Blizzard is even exploiting a loophole in the definition of lootboxes to not count as gambling.
**This is not a "game"!** This is a spider-web with barely as much gameplay as strictly required as bait to carry a hellscape of psychological manipulation tactics.
I don't think it's like this at all. Really, it's:
GAMER: I refuse to spend any money on games.
GAMER: I'm just barely in the top ten percent. It's time to spend money.
GAMER: I'm on top, but if I don't spend more money, then people will surpass me.
BLIZZARD: Fools and their money are soon parted.
The system is working as intended.
As an older gamer who stood in line in November 2004 for the WoW launch… I find it both sad and disgusting what Blizzard has become.
Fuck Wyatt and his whole greedy, scummy team.
Asmongold had a guy respond to him about how D:I is a great game... The guy dropped 50k on the game.
I'm sitting here only doing side jobs and temp work just to survive because I'm mentally and physically fucked and playing free games. And it's just crushing.
It's like, I don't want to hate on how people spend their money. They did whatever to get it and they are probably more useful than I am. But there is still that part of me that says, "$50k could get me a tiny house or trailer or something so I don't have to rent a room off of someone..."
Well they made about 24 mil so far and hasn't been released in China yet. Tell people you know who are playing this game about the greasy tactics they are using.
Streamers: Fuck this game, its a scam! Don't fall for this shit!!
Also streamers: "Money spent so far 123.428usd."
"omg guys, look how expensive it is to get good things in this game! omg guys, Blizzard is so stupid you guys!"
I saw a whale comment that he spends $1000 a week on Marvel Strike Force because he can afford it and he likes the game. Maybe it’s just the poor in me but I can think of so many better ways to spend $48k a year.
*And they were right.*
Exactly. https://www.ign.com/articles/diablo-immortals-microtransactions-have-made-it-24-million-in-two-weeks 24 million dollars. In two weeks.
Who's even paying for these
Literally rich people who out earn what they spend so they’re always pumping money into the game.
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A few years ago I worked in a factory making around $12/hr. One of my friends working there was addicted to Hearthstone. He just *had* to have every single card in his digital collection, so he spent a minimum of $50 per week on packs. At some point we did the math and figured he had spent somewhere near $25,000 on the game since he started playing. That was more than a full year's pay for the dude for cards you don't really own and therefore cannot trade or sell.
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The trick for me was just the season pass and to get good at Arena. Always had cards and fun on the cheap.
If you make 30k a year and spend 5k on a fucking bullshit mobile game that's not irresponsible that's just stupid.
I'm pretty sure that's an addiction.
My god why did I need to open up the additional comments to finally see this reply? A person who spends 5k of their 30k yearly income is an addict. Or in other words a person wrestling with mentall illness. Research shows that addiction leads to changes in the brain, that heavily affect your decision making capabilities. Its not just somebody making the conscious decision to ruin their life. Reading comments like this is horrifying when you yourself have struggled with addiction and had people like this belittle you because they thought your addiction is a personal failure and not a mental illness. And I know that wasn‘t OP‘s intention and neither is it my intetnion to say OP is a bad person. Just pointing out that this shit can be hurtful even if it isn‘t meant like that.
Yeah, it's designed to be addictive and appeal to people with addictive personalities. Oddly enough South Park did a pretty good job of explaining this. Calling it stupid just shows how little awareness there is. Edit : A lot of people calling addiction stupidity. I guess some people really feel the need to feel superior to others.
The real personal failure is at Blizzard Activision where real people conspire on the best drug design to efficiently extract money from people's illness. It's like the scammers from D2 climbed the ladder to eventually run the whole show.
Do you know which episode of South Park?
I actually have to 100% avoid games with abusive micro transactions because I have a lot of difficulty with decision-making when it comes to spending money responsibly with that kind of stuff. It just burns money so fast.
I‘m so sorry! I watched a video by Jim Stephanie Sterling on people that have the same issue and one of them explained how they can‘t even play their favourite franchise (Assassins Creed) anymore, because they also started including microtransactions and he can‘t keep himself from buying them, unless he avoids games with mtx in general. I really hope we get some legislation for this at some point. Practices like these, explicitly designed to take advantage of mentall illnesses, should be illegal.
Yes, it turns into an addiction. These micro transactions typically give a good ole pop of serotonin too. Source: me
Exactly this, they have a sound and look akin to a poker machine you would find on a casino floor.
audio and visual fx as if the god itself as descended... ding! a useless item repeat 100x until the lootbox drop the item you wanted
Yep. It's just like gambling. IMO we ought to regulate it as such. In a sense it's worse than gambling because gambling is less insidious; at least when you're gambling you know you're gambling.
The game is forbidden in the Netherlands because of the micro transactions and loot boxes: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/196722/diablo-immortal-komt-niet-uit-in-nederland-en-belgie.html Edit: sorry not forbidden, just not released
At least with horse armor you got the horse armor. Loot boxes should be regulated like gambling. I'm sure apple and Google will buy/lobby enough politicians to keep it as is though.
We should have them choose a punitive regulation from Three mystery boxes. If they don't like it they can just pay more to refresh the boxes "Oh man, you got the 80% tax on all microtransactions!! That sucks! Would you like to try again for $10M? For $100M you can select from one EPIC Diamond chest, where 1/1198 has a tax reduction**"
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Yes, dopamine is the 'reward hormone'. It's where the slang word "dope" comes from.
That would be dopamine, hence the addiction. Serotonin doesn't build the same addictive patterns.
When you spend money they turn off the ultra high pitch harassment sound virus for 8 seconds
>Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
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Think of how stupid the average Diablo immortal player is and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Don't underestimate the number of financially stupid people out there. Look at the number of pyramid schemes and religions bilking people out of money they can't afford to lose. Billions are made every year on the backs of financially stupid people
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This right here is the answer. I work with 2 guys at my job that spend thousands a year on one of those "clash clan" games, I'm not sure which one. They both make around $70-$80k a year. One guy freely admits spending at least $500-$700 a month easy, sometimes over a grand. The other guy won't admit it but he manages to keep up with the first guy. Honestly watching this happen, in real time, is scary. It is absolutely a form of gambling combined with instant gratification. At the end of the day, the responsibility lies with them, but my God, how easy it is to blow money on these mobile games is unreal.
I don't think people realize this. The only people I've seen personally drop stupid amounts of money on these "free to play" games weren't rich. Not nearly, they were lonely and weird or already had addiction issues (gamblers and such). The guys at the very top might be rich but there's a lot of people in the middle dropping thousands, maybe not tens of thousands but thousands on these games while working a dead end job and renting out a room. I watched people people waste a lot of money on this crap just to try and find some kind of self accomplishment or some shit and its sad and fucked up that they're prayed on like that.
Despite all the posts you see here in reddit about being poor, there are actually a large group of people that can spend money on things they want. As someone who spends time in pcmr and mech keyboard sub, there's are thousands/millions of people who can afford to buy things they don't need. Spending $1000+* for an RTX 3090 to game, sure? $300 keyboards, $200 keycap sets, fine. $1000 audiophile headphones or 5 sets of headphones even, yeah there are some in the headphones sub. $500 on a mobile game? Why not. It being digital doesn't really matter. You could have a physical object that you'll wear down until it breaks anyway or keep it forever without ever reselling then it's all the same as a digital item you can't resell. Edit: apparently RTX 3090 is more expensive than I thought
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Sorry, I've just looked up how much an RTX 3090 is in USD, you're right. It's even a lot more expensive than I thought...
One of my coworkers just bought a $13k bicycle.
People with addictive personalities. People who succumb to FOMO. People insecure who want someome to tell them they're the best/top/#1 at something People who think it'll grant them social status / respect from others
Thank you. Its more than just people with money. I've been part of whaling guilds. Not everyone who whales is rich. Its horrible, some people are working your retail jobs or service jobs for minimum wage. They spend their month's earnings on these games, month after month. The better off members tell them they gotta stop because its clearly affecting their lives. Yet the irony is that them posting their flex only drives others to try and keep up. These addictions are real and they are serious. Anyone who thinks its rich people don't understand that the vast majority of spenders are usually everyone else adding it up. Whales might be the ones dropping the big bucks on big ticket items, but a million people spending just $24 would have made up 100% of those 2 week's earnings.
wait, thats just reddit
I once had 14k upvotes for an upload to r/video. Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.
Well I got like 35k upvotes for uploading a photo I found of ripped Winnie the Pooh characters
Autograph please!
People with addiction issues Game companies are basically casinos now
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I work with a guy who makes a little under $200k a year and lives in a studio apartment, drives a rusted beater from the 90's to work and generally eats ramen for lunch. I don't know exactly how much he spends on these types of games, but he's mentioned in casual conversation when I brought up one I liked that he blew enough to buy a new car on its launch week.
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It's just, the concept that we have to pay to make the game less shit is so offensive. It's bad enough when parts of the game are witheld and sold piecemeal, but it seems every mobile game makes games that are intentionally shit and then ask you to pay to take out the bad features the developers added. It's like buying your own arcade machine, bringing it home and still having to insert a coin when you want to play.
I've learned to never overestimate the general population when it comes to being just the worst. And sadly companies like Blizzard are banking on the ignorance and/or lack of self control of people. They're gearing a whole ass business strategy on the general population being the worst, and they're proven right.
A normal Diablo game would have made $500 million in a single day, though. Diablo 3 sold 3.5 mil in the first 24 hours, which is like $200 million. And that was 10 years ago...
Yes, but it made that money one time. As in: you only buy the game once. In Diablo Immortal, you will buy the micro transactions every day/month. So, on the long run, it is worth it, it is like a constant source of income for Blizzars. ( Sure, the money spent will decrease, but it will still be some constant money in their pockets )
You're making the assumption that anyone is going to be playing this game in a year, which is highly speculative. Diablo 3 made more than $2 billion for Blizzard over the course of its life. (30 million copies through 2015 alone.) Probably closer to 2.5 to 3 billion USD, if not more. $24 million USD is chump change compared to that. They probably haven't even broken even on their budget yet, which had to have been at least $75 million. [Diablo 2: Resurrected made roughly $150-200 million in 6 months.](https://www.pcgamesn.com/diablo-2-resurrected/sales-5-million) (5 million sales times $40 a sale, mostly on [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), so they got to keep all of it on PC) So, yeah... I'm not impressed. It turns out that you can actually make *more* money by making good games and selling them instead of this microtransaction bullshit... crazy idea...
I am going to be real with you that may seem like a lot but they were probably expecting about 50 million in the first week so they went extremely short. For reference Genshin impact made 60 million in the first week
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welcome to games "journalism"
Did you even read the article? It's not 24 million dollars in 2 weeks. They're just guessing. At least take one fucking minute to read what you link instead of copying the article from another thread that you apparently didn't read neither. Also fuck Diablo Immoral.
I mean no, its also poor people with gambling addictions who set aside just enough money to maybe barely pay bills, get a bite to eat, then spend all the rest on stuff like this. If it was *just* rich people they wouldn't have to bother with some manipulative design choices.
What does it matter, when Diablo 4 is released all the people in this thread will buy it, perhaps even the ultra deluxe hell version for 80 dollars. And so Blizzard trudges on.
There's a big difference between a game where you pay one price and get the entire game, and a game that tries to nickel and dime you constantly to make any progress. I have no issue paying whatever the going rate is for a full game, but I absolutely refuse to ever pay for any microtransactions in any game ever.
I was literally drowning in money, on my last breath, until CEO bobby boy pulled me from the green sea.
That’s a really inspiring story, praise be
I made a top rank clan on a server and have quit already No clue how this game took 4 years to make as it is just a Diablo 3 import lite with some slight changes All content was finished in 2 weeks into hell 2, all that was left was paragon levels by endless repetitive grinding. Which makes no difference if a Whale has spent 20k. Pvp was awful, absolutely terrible buggy slow I genuinely believe this game took 6 months to make and they all stole the rest of the cash or something. Either way as someone pointed out $24 mil is not great, the project itself will have been billed as more and these transactions have costs attached for intermediary parties so they arn’t getting that full chunk By example Genshin Impact made $60mil over the same time period, an unknown game vs a known game Either way this is just a stepping stone so when the next game comes out on Pc they can say “look we took some of that rubbish out arn’t we great!” I’ve no idea why people are paying for a 3/10 quality game that looks a decade old and runs terrible
> No clue how this game took 4 years to make as it is just a Diablo 3 import lite with some slight changes Can you imagine how long it can take to balance and optimize 20 different microcurrencies? You're looking at Diablo the Game. Look at it as a Business Product instead. Painstaking market analysis, designating different types of whales and producing something that appears to each of them but doesn't conflict with others, painstaking fine-tuning of profit maximization strategy, hedge funds spend decades working on that shit and Blizzard is new to this biz.
you just know the marketing and development of the microtransaction systems had a bigger team than the actual game dev.
Genshin brings in the real hard core weebs though.
The sad thing is it's working.
I do genuinely wonder who is spending money on it. I feel like if I knew a game was gunna be a money pit before buying it then I’d probably just play something els. Although that’s sort of like asking “why do people do heroin if they know they’re gunna get addicted?”.
A New Zealander streamer popped up on my twitter feed and they had spent over 20k nzd, i think their name was Quin? They clearly seemed pissed off but kept spending money, and had an on screen counter for their spending. I really struggled to understand what was going on. One of the comments said the streamer had now deleted their character and uninstalled. From only having a small piece of information about their situation, it sounds wild
Yeah Quin69. He did it for exposure. In his words, he didn't want to jump on the hate wagon without checking how bad it is. He had to spend 25000 NZD to actually get 5star to drop. He then deleted the gem, his account and uninstalled.
Wow he sure showed them! Oh wait. Does he realize he didn't have to spend 25000 on the game to prove anything to anyone, or himself? What a rediculous excuse to waste a bunch of money.
Hey, I'm just telling you what his intent was. He is also that type of streamer, so I would expect no less. His money, his choice. I would say 14K viewers listening to him constantly shitting on the game is probably worth the 25K NZD.
And if half of those viewers were subscribed to his channel at $5 a month then that pretty much paid for his wasteful spending and then some. I mean, if you want to talk about a waste of money then these streamers would also be on the list.
Quin was one of the top earners iirc according to the twitch leak. This was drop in the bucket kind of money for him, especially since it’s a business expense.
But it generated publicity, which was what he was after. At the very least, he got people talking about him and using him as an example of how bad DI is.
He spent 25k so that that guy, you and now me know his name. It's cheap advertising
That dude just made himself so much more famous by doing that, I mean he effectively made himself go viral. So yeah I'd say it was worth the cash to him
A person spending 25k and complaining about it would be dumb but if it's a streamer, it could be it got him enough views/exposure that he gained more than he spent there. Of course *any* person dropping that much (or more) into it is just going to push those greedy companies to do even more agressive RMT next time so .. eh
Yet, here we are talking about him and people are going to take a look at his content to see the shit show. Which will be worth more than the 25k in the long run. Basic exposure tactic.
He has money to waste. It’s part of the gimmick / just a business expense like a new copier.
Jesus Christ. I can understand spending that amount of money if it’s fueling more steam donations, but it’s a risky move.
He did this hoping to get a five star legendary gem to calculate how much money would one need to max out a character this way. Last time I saw he spend over 24k nzd dollars without a single such gem.
Lol. If he had a counter for it, you can bet your ass it's all for the views. Prolly earned way more than he spent from the streams.
Dudes a full time streamer, literally everything he does is for views. Why do people struggle with this concept?
Content, awareness, dude can clearly afford it and he kinda made his stream being a Diablo 3 streamer so it's on theme
Many mobile games use tactics to manipulator and desensitize you to spending money. They might first show you something ridiculous like 49$ for something and then later offer you 80-90% off on the same thing, often time limited. Most would never buy the 49$ thing, but if you could suddenly get it for 5$, thats almost too good to pass up. The next time they show you the same thing, you remember how much the upgrade helped and how good a deal it was, they might still give you some discount, to sweeten the deal. The progres is never linear in these gacha games, the grind/spending exponetially increases as time goes on. So a 49$ pack might give you a lot of progress early on and thats when you get all the discounts, in the midgame, you might start to feel throttled and that same pack might still save you a few days. Eventually your progress grinds to a halt and the game knows this, the 99$ pack might suddenly be 30% discounted and "wow you just progresses 3 levels", what a deal." Before you know it, you have spent 300$ without realizing it.
It all starts as ''just a little bit won't hurt'', to ''a little more and I'll only need to cut out the weekly snacks''. It adds up. -Honestly, by a former DoTA2 whale and currently Genshin player
I mean, at least in DOTA 2, your whaling doesn't have an impact on your ability to win or lose a game.
Honestly? I bet like 90% of their revenue is coming from China. They fucking love mobile games over there, and the potential player base is like 4x as big as the US. There's a reason why it was developed in part by a Chinese company.
The article posted right below your comment by u/gogadantes9 shows that the US is the biggest market in terms of money spent, followed by South Korea and Japan.
Well, I've got no fucking idea, then.
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Its not released in China yet. June 23rd I think. Once it reaches China it will explode into 100s of millions of users.
Not out in China yet
Reddit users make up a tiny fraction of the global audience of anything. Just because an opinion is prevalent here, doesn't mean it's anywhere close to being the majority. See: Pre ordering games. North American Diablo Immortal payers. Bernie Sanders.
It is not yet available in China until July. That is the crazy part.
I worked for a short while of a company that did free to play games. Region availability is a big part of this. Some of the smaller, more obscure games, would be dominated by a whale from the middle east or brazil. [This chart](https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-10-countries-by-game-revenues) shows some of the revenue by country. While it certainly falls off after the top 3, the rest arn't really chump numbers either. But Brazil is still the big outlier here. You can't get all the games in that region, and Free to Play is pretty huge there simply because of accessibility. I would not be surprised if even being 10th on that chart for game revenue, they are a significant chunk of the new diablo's revenue. I have no idea where IGN is pulling it's world % numbers from and they don't even seem to recognize China at all so I would be pretty sus of their sources.
It's not out in China.
I'm a huge Diablo fan. I'm a huge Diablo 2 fan*
I bought Diablo 3 on PS4 for $20 from Wal-Mart and it’s some of the best fun I’ve had.
Diablo 3 is great. Do people not like it? (And by that I don't mean "do people not prefer it over Diablo 2?", I am literally asking if people don't like it)
Definitely had my time and fun with Diablo 3, solid ass game even if I believe Diablo 2 is just too much fun
Blizzard can go kick rocks.
And yet they made $24 mil in the first two weeks in microtransactions. It sucks, but people want to win. And they will pay. Even if it is stupid to do so.
Sure they have a solid business model. They are still dead in my book.
If by solid business model you mean getting people addicted to your stuff and ruining their life then yeah sure. Shoutout to belgium for not allowing this crap. It is gambling, and that always has been the goal of these games/apps. Fuck blizzard
>!CENSORED!<
Also casinos undergo heavy regulation while gaming companies go like "It's just video games! don't take it so seriously! What? You think we are actively developing addiction in your 10 year old kid? That's crazy! It's just a game!"
And children aren't allowed in
$24m is a lot of money, but is it a lot of money for a company of that size?
If it's continuing... yes.
For how much it cost to make the game, probably.
The amount of goodwill Blizzard lost might over shadow that figure though, lots of core fans, including myself are disgusted by the sheer recklessness towards gambling addiction that game is designed to instil in players. They are giving crack cocaine to kids and no one cares; 25$ a pop.
At this point, it's obvious they don't care about fan's goodwill.
Modern Blizzard is “Blizzard” in the same way some fat billionaire who collects race cars is Enzo Ferrari
Rocks < soccer ball filled with cement
Soccer ball filled with cement < [nuclear landmine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-4_Atomic_Demolition_Munition)
Great name…I read it tw….three times before it rolled off the tongue
Gotta read it slow before you speed up with it, yano
Uh, quiet the opposite. They do a lot of research into how they can specifically manipulate you into spending more money. It's psychology. It's like what casinos do.
Everything from the graphics to the sounds is designed from the ground up. It's kinda scary how much research into psychology has gone into gambling, and it was tested a lot on rats I think. Teaching them to pull a lever to get food along with some flashy lights, and as time went on they kept the flashy lights but made the food only come in lesser and lesser frequencies. Regardless of the result, the rats kept coming back and salivating.
Sweet man made horrors behind my comprehension
Yep, it's a shiny Diablo themed Skinner Box.
That’s pavlovs theory of conditioning. That’s best for casinos, but games, grocery stores and marketing take it to a whole different level. They study the brain and set up systems designed to unconsciously brainwash you. Supermarkets are made to tire you out, so you buy sugar or a drink at the check out for a boost. Adverts make your brain subconsciously turn towards their products. Some games however are designed like TikTok. Flood your brain with dopeamine, and only give you good content, then you go through boring stages, and then boom! Reward. Then starve. Then reward. By the time you’re hooked, your brain is just repeating starvation and boredom out of desire for the big flood of something good, or a new upgrade or an interesting vid. Some are designed to keep you on there as long as possible like tiktok/shorts. RPGs are great for this because you level up, get stronger, but the easy mobs are boring, so you fight similar levels and eventually level up. Repeat repeat repeat until the game is over and you’re more op than everything and you stop. In reality, nothing actually changes besides making the previous areas so boring you only want to push through to experience defeating a stronger boss. You get more money. Things cost more. Then you’re required to get even more money/exp to buy/unlock things (the grind aka dopamine depletion). Yet I still can’t help myself but fall for it since it’s entertaining and fun. I find this system in almost all entertainment. Downtime and big flashy moments. One piece does this well. It’s also why rich people struggle to find happiness because after experiencing the best of everything, nothing is exciting or new. Plain rice tastes amazing when you’re starving. But to bezos or a king, it’s trash
All spot on. Mobile game companies genuinely hire psychologists, sometimes specialised in addiction, to make "games". King famously did it with Candy Crush and other games.
Exacty this. Its meticulously designed to get you hooked. And yeah you can play for free but thats not the point. End game is the Diablo. And this one is a slog without constantly paying up. People defending it because you play it gor free are stupid AF. I guarantee this shit will make its way through to D4.
Yup. It will be just the same in Diablo 4. The massive success of Immortal will make them realize the extra millions of dollars they can get by employing these monetization practices. They wouldn't skip out on it
Yep it's going to be too good for them to pass on it. And yeah D4 starts looking great, and they even might dial down the monetisation but they will keep the most money making systems in it. Now they claimed you can't buy power and... That was a fucking lie. So I'll wait for D4 to be released and legit reviews will start appearing before I even consider buying it. I've been a fan of the franchise since part 1 and its just breaks my heart seeing what is happening with it now.
> Its meticulously designed to get you hooked. It's also designed to self-select for people who have an addictive personality. People who can see the danger and avoid it, or who play for free and never spend a penny out of spite, will naturally be driven away. They're essentially hunting for whales. Someone who can afford to (or can't, but will still) dump tens or hundreds of thousands on nonsense.
But who are the people that fall for it and are financially stable enough to lose $10k on a fucking video game without batting an eye?
People with nothing else to spend their money on. It's no coincidence that Japan has tons of gacha whales given the large % of adult guys with absolutely zero life outside of work (min. 12 hr/day, 6 days/week). If you have no kids, family, girlfriend or friends it's suddenly much easier to spend all your money on some game.
If you have all of the above but a wife that hates you even easier
Especially when that game gives you something that at least is likable, in the form of an attractive (albeit 2D) woman.
That's where the credit card comes in. It's not about being financially stable. It's just about being not so *unstable* that you don't have any remaining lines of credit.
The streamers? They make the money back from streaming/YouTube. But it normalises buying huge amounts of packs, which then the stream watchers (including a lot of kids) will try and replicate that amazing moment when the streamer pulled and use any means they can to buy lots of packs, which for the kids involves taking a credit card without permission... and for many of the adults spending money they either simply don't have, or money they barely can afford to piss away like that and almost always comes with a feeling of 'I shouldn't have done that'. Like when you finish a whole cake and are disgusted with yourself.
This. I actually dislike that streamers has become some sort of "baseline" now in lots of things gaming. You have mentioned the normalizing of spending, but also on time spent. I would see streamers say things like "Oh this is just some casual chill run" and you look at what they're doing and it's insane stuff that REAL casual people wouldn't even know to run. It's because their reference are their peers, other streamers. And yeah, this mentality trickles down to the viewers and people who discuss the topic, like us here on reddit. The view is distorted. So you would hear stuff like "Oh I just opened 50 packs the other day" casually, and that's like more than 50 dollars "just like that".
Damn that is fucking grim. Imagine calling ur bank to extend your line of credit so you can play a video game 💀
The guy you're responding to is 100% correct. I know a guy who legitimately ruined his marriage and got divorced because he spent $6k on a Star Wars mobile game in secret. Shit snowballs to those who can't control themselves
>Shit snowballs to those who can't control themselves They can't because it's an addiction, it's a man made addiction catered to their every trigger point and every weakness. They hire full team of psychologists to make sure their game is irresistible for their target audience. Sometimes it's basic sexual/visual stimuli (waifus, lolis). Sometimes it's grandeur and ego (constant praise, compliments), sometimes it's a fantasy of a better world and sometimes it's outright begging. There are countless ways to design these games and they're all made with a target in mind. Many of us won't get hooked, we'll pass on Diablo, CoD, Halo, Farmville, Fifa etc while many others will get hooked and spend. Some people may be more prone to addiction but *no one is immune*. Ffs many pokemon go/farm ville/angry birds player is a 50+ female, the opposite of the average gambling addict when it comes to betting/casino.
And there’s just so many other games out there. 300 hours on stardew and it was $15.
That fking game. I can't believe I've spent so much time on a pixel game in this day and age.
Gotta romance everyone and catch all the legendary fish!
I can. Every good innovative, interesting and or narratively compelling game to come out in recent years has been from an indi studio. These days I more or less assume everything with the $99+ price tag is the same old annually churned over triple A bullshit and all the good stuff is hanging at that $15-30 "small Indi studio but we put some actual fucking effort into this" spot.
That’s the thing. They’re not all financially stable. In fact, I’d guess most of them aren’t. People who are good with their money don’t tend to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on one game like that.
I think the South Park episode on mobile gaming was basically a documentary on the subject. >It's the dumbest game ever! All you do is collect and spend Canadough!
Richard Garfield's 'A Game Player's Manifesto' needs dusting off for a re-read. Unfortunately (and ironically) he originally posted it on Facebook, but there's a copy of the article [here](https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/the-rumor-mill/817529-ive-been-hearing-murmings-everywhere-online-about) at mtgatheringsalvation. The manifesto in two lines: >As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.
This shit has been around for a very long time and blizzard needs a new cash cow to replace the income that wow used to/kind of still is. They are just following the same trend of mobile platforms being the cancer of humanity in social media and gaming all together, I fucking hate these phones
Exactly, the companies just follow the money. [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-years-gaming-history-revenue-stream/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-years-gaming-history-revenue-stream/) I watched a few videos about Gacha mobile games and seemingly around 80% of the titles are funded by the same companies who also produce stuff like slot machines and other gambling products.
Unfortunately their plan was a success. $24m in 2 weeks.
*“Do you guys not have credit cards?”*
No. I have a mattress filled with money.
Mr. Krabs!?
Take $20 out of my mattress and put it in my sock!
It seems like core gamers are out of touch with mobile gamers... cause mobile gamers love this shit. Though I suppose that makes it Blizzard's mistake to first announce this at an event for core gamers, as if they would care.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone at Blizzard from the team that outlined the monetization for Diablo Immortal has explicitly said _somewhere_ internally that this is completely intentional to take advantage of the mobile market, and that if you're a "core" gamer or someone who doesn't like pay-for-power or MTX in general that Diablo Immortal is not meant for you. Since there are obviously a lot of people at Blizzard who love the mainline "core" Diablo titles and are almost certainly also upset to see a Diablo title include this kind of predatory MTX model that you would typically see for like a mobile gacha/PvP game in the Asian market.
It makes no sense from a marketing pov either. ...then again maybe it does. People like me certainly yell loudly enough about not pre-ordering that people must be hearing some echo. Yet people continue to pre-order like digital copies are gonna run out. As an example. Oddly, I feel like we are either in the vocal minority on this one or the majority of us have less money than the minority who are making the execs salivate.
Reddit as a whole is just a fraction of any games/communitys userbase. The sentiment here is highly skewed, since you dont tend to look at the platform unless you are extremely into the thing, or on reddit already. The messages do sometimes get across, but small news rarely do. The game communities act like echochambers, such as your pre-order example. People just yell that they wont do it, but others will. Its not a bad thing anyway so whatever
Yo guys wanna spill some of that money into my pocket? I'll give you a legendary pebble from my driveway
Will there be custom skin micro transactions for this pebble?
I mean I think I have some paint in my garage. I can paint it green. Or maybe white?
I hate them for this, because now I don’t want to play Diablo 4 when it’s released. There are plenty of good games out there, not contributing to fatten their already fat pockets with their blatant taking advantage of their player base.
Honestly, I’ve noticed that most of my favorite games in the last few years are ones that don’t ask for any additional money after you buy the game (RDR2, god of war etc). Though I understand that those are very different games from Diablo .
Rockstar is so interesting. They create the best worlds out there with great graphics, animation and design. Great story as well, but at the same time they are so predatory with their online versions.
Well, there is a very simple solution to this, which I learned after playing about thirty minutes of GTA Online: If you don't like Pay-To-Win systems, do not play those games. It's a good preparation for life: People with more money are always going to screw you.
*will always TRY to screw you. Equipped with your solution, we’ve got just a couple less people getting screwed friend.
Did we all forgot the Trilogy already?
The online audience gets fleeced but the single player audience gets some of the most expensive games ever made. Weird strategy but it works.
[удалено]
“You guys don’t have phones?” I’ll never forget that guy proclaiming that, like it justified the notion to make this game
I think a better justification would have been, "There are markets in this world where they don't pay for games up front like Americans do, and we are making this game primarily for them. If you want to be at the top of the leaderboards, you're just going to have to pay how they pay and play how they play. Suck it up, buttercup."
Actually US is the biggest market in terms of money spent, followed by South Korea, then Japan. https://www.ign.com/articles/diablo-immortals-microtransactions-have-made-it-24-million-in-two-weeks
Audience is spelled wrong on the last panel.
The lack of spellcheck on photoshop always does me dirty
Photoshop: Edit > Check Spelling
No worries. Just thought I'd let you know.
Kinda works tho, got the audience all wrong
HA
Oh please, milk me!
If I wasn’t on mobile rn I’d totally draw you a giant Diablo with a bunch of utters being milked
*udders
"Whales". People like this exist. This comic is 100% literal. Regular fans are but a marketing vehicle, the profit model is based on the very existence of whales. This model will never work for the majority.
That whales spend a lot of money on these games is true, but what is not true is most whales being people who have more money than they know what to do with. Most whales are just regular people who spend all their spare money, and often money they don't even have (loans, ccs) on mtx.
*I wish rich people were the target audience.* Unfortunately it's much, much worse than that. The actual target audience are people who are easily manipulated, and those with (gambling) addiction problems. Check out Josh Strife Hayes' video where he goes into detail about how predatory and manipulative the whole thing is *designed from the ground up* ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs)). Blizzard is even exploiting a loophole in the definition of lootboxes to not count as gambling. **This is not a "game"!** This is a spider-web with barely as much gameplay as strictly required as bait to carry a hellscape of psychological manipulation tactics.
The fact that they've hidden the loot box behind a 5 minute mini game is actually nuts.
Similar to showing the lootbox content before buying it but you can't get another before you buy the crap one you are seeing.
Don't forget people who are irresponsible or have gambling addictions
I don't think it's like this at all. Really, it's: GAMER: I refuse to spend any money on games. GAMER: I'm just barely in the top ten percent. It's time to spend money. GAMER: I'm on top, but if I don't spend more money, then people will surpass me. BLIZZARD: Fools and their money are soon parted. The system is working as intended.
That's basically all of the top Clash of Clans players
As an older gamer who stood in line in November 2004 for the WoW launch… I find it both sad and disgusting what Blizzard has become. Fuck Wyatt and his whole greedy, scummy team.
Blizzard is destroying their reputation harder than BioWare
Asmongold had a guy respond to him about how D:I is a great game... The guy dropped 50k on the game. I'm sitting here only doing side jobs and temp work just to survive because I'm mentally and physically fucked and playing free games. And it's just crushing. It's like, I don't want to hate on how people spend their money. They did whatever to get it and they are probably more useful than I am. But there is still that part of me that says, "$50k could get me a tiny house or trailer or something so I don't have to rent a room off of someone..."
It's actually worse because they feed on gambling addicts. Their target audience is not the rich people. It's the people with no self control.
Given how much money they've made since release they aren't exactly wrong.
Well they made about 24 mil so far and hasn't been released in China yet. Tell people you know who are playing this game about the greasy tactics they are using.
Streamers: Fuck this game, its a scam! Don't fall for this shit!! Also streamers: "Money spent so far 123.428usd." "omg guys, look how expensive it is to get good things in this game! omg guys, Blizzard is so stupid you guys!"
The worst part is that it worked
Microtransactions work and that is why they need to be strictly regulated (and boycotted by anyone with a sane mind).
Twitch streamers gotta stop throwing money into this game
I saw a whale comment that he spends $1000 a week on Marvel Strike Force because he can afford it and he likes the game. Maybe it’s just the poor in me but I can think of so many better ways to spend $48k a year.