The sad thing is it seems that Blizzard learned the wrong lesson. The experiment proved to overwhelmingly be a massive, anger generating failure and Blizzard axed it in 2014. While some gamers played the market and made money, mostly people hated how it threw off the endgame balancing. Diablo III launched in 2012 with a real-money focused in-game auction house. The ad blatantly mocked the concept of pay-to-win mechanics, and while StarCraft II does offer in-game purchases of commanders in some of the multiplayer it avoids most of the pay-to-win traps.īut a handful of years before that Blizzard went through a different kind of real money resentment. Blizzard learned the wrong lessonīarely a handful of years ago Blizzard ran an ad campaign promoting StarCraft II moving to a free-to-pay model. And it needs to be said that it’s possible to beat the main game without engaging with any of that stuff. I think the whole thing is kind of gross, but if it takes dozens of hours to reach the pay-to-win endgame it’s still dozens of hours of potential fun.
The opposite argument, of course, is that it’s a free-to-play game. The argument online is that instead of being upfront with people Blizzard is relying on some kind of sunk cost fallacy to force players to spend. The high price tag is based on the fact that items needed to upgrade are only found in the high end loot boxes, which can only be purchased with real money. Reports suggest that fully upgrading a character to the absolute max could cost around $100,000. But the late game is where they try to hook folks. The early game and mid game are quite enjoyable and easy to play without spending a dime. Diablo: Immortal’s microtransactions creep up on youĭiablo: Immortal takes a sneakier approach. That particular game tried for the quick cash grab by utilizing an energy system that drained quickly, recovered slowly and nudged players toward spending money. Other mobile games with serious microtransactions tend to hit players with them relatively quickly Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy springs to mind as an example. The intense dislike for the game is because gamers feel it’s deceptive about the fairly standard mobile practices it employs.
0 kommentar(er)
