The Diablo 4 pre-order bundles, and their supposed cost

[TheRevenantHero]

You literally don't have agument here beyond "I NO LIKE THING". That's subjective, not objective. You don't like it. And you think (incorrectly) that you speak for everyone, or even most people.

"I'm gonna say you have no argument because I'm mad I can't refute what you're saying" is essentially what you've been responding with. Everything I've said is objective. You just say it's not because you don't like the answer.

[Endus]

"I'm gonna say you have no argument because I'm mad I can't refute what you're saying" is essentially what you've been responding with. Everything I've said is objective. You just say it's not because you don't like the answer.

It isn't.

Your dislike of seria!ized storytelling is entirely your subjective dislike, without any objectivity whatsoever.
Your insistence that publishers are "greedy" for trying to monetize their products, or "lazy" because they did so effectively, that's all wholly subjective and more than a little unreasonably biased.

You don't have an objective argument. You mistake you preferences for objective truth.

[Fallen Angel]

I explained how I'm relating it to D4. If you don't want to read my explanation, that's on you.

I think based on Blizzard's past releases, it's a pretty safe assumption the game will be incomplete at launch.

Nothing specifically to do with D4. Only absurd assumptions and garbage arguments based on subjective opinion.

[Stickiler]

Again, my point is that Blizzard had the entire story written but they drip fed it to us. So...yeah. It was an incomplete game because Blizzard purposely shipped it like that.

Right, but, taking GoW as that's what you've referenced elsewhere, they knew when they first started the first game that they were going to make three games, and thus they had the story written out and yet "drip-fed" it to you over, what ended up being, 2 games, rather than letting you play through the entirety of the story they'd written in one single game. How is this functionality different from an MMO where they write a story for an expansion and release it in chunks through patches?

[TheRevenantHero]

Nothing specifically to do with D4. Only absurd assumptions and garbage arguments based on subjective opinion.

Ironic considering you've not made a legitimate point this entire thread.

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Right, but, taking GoW as that's what you've referenced elsewhere, they knew when they first started the first game that they were going to make three games, and thus they had the story written out and yet "drip-fed" it to you over, what ended up being, 2 games, rather than letting you play through the entirety of the story they'd written in one single game. How is this functionality different from an MMO where they write a story for an expansion and release it in chunks through patches?

And Blizzard had the story complete for all of Shadowlands but dripfed it to us. I legit can't think of a single MMO other than WoW that makes you wait for the final patch of the entire expansion to actually see the ending of said expansion.

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It isn't.

Your dislike of seria!ized storytelling is entirely your subjective dislike, without any objectivity whatsoever.
Your insistence that publishers are "greedy" for trying to monetize their products, or "lazy" because they did so effectively, that's all wholly subjective and more than a little unreasonably biased.

You don't have an objective argument. You mistake you preferences for objective truth.

Considering Blizzard is the only company I can think of that pulls this dumb shit, I'm going to say I'm objectively correct with my statements.

[Stickiler]

And Blizzard had the story complete for all of Shadowlands but dripfed it to us. I legit can't think of a single MMO other than WoW that makes you wait for the final patch of the entire expansion to actually see the ending of said expansion.

That's how every MMO works, they write the story for the whole expansion, and then determine which parts of it they want to put in to each patch. That's just a bog standard development practice.

[Mamut]

And Blizzard had the story complete for all of Shadowlands but dripfed it to us. I legit can't think of a single MMO other than WoW that makes you wait for the final patch of the entire expansion to actually see the ending of said expansion.

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Considering Blizzard is the only company I can think of that pulls this dumb shit, I'm going to say I'm objectively correct with my statements.

Are you serious here? I played alot of MMOs and every one of them had written whole expansion and reveals new things with every patch. Like new zones, dungeons, raids, sieges etc.
Noone is gonna drop like three different tiers of content at once on players. That would be stupid.

[TheRevenantHero]

That's how every MMO works, they write the story for the whole expansion, and then determine which parts of it they want to put in to each patch. That's just a bog standard development practice.

That is NOT how every MMO works. WoW is the only MMO that I've played that I've had to wait over a year to see the ending of an expansion.

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Are you serious here? I played alot of MMOs and every one of them had written whole expansion and reveals new things with every patch. Like new zones, dungeons, raids, sieges etc.
Noone is gonna drop like three different tiers of content at once on players. That would be stupid.

Read my shit more slowly. I said that WoW is the only MMO that gates THE STORY. Adding raids and dungeons that create NEW stories are fine. But needing to wait for the ending of the base story of the campaign is asinine.

[Adamas102]

No, not "lazy". In any respect. That's just empty slander that betrays a deep failure to understand market systems and how pricing works.

With Diablo IV, they're putting out a full, unique game. With extras on top. Nothing "lazy" about that, compared to just making the base game.

Laziness, as it was clearly explained, is the model by which revenue is shifted towards low effort offerings that provide higher profit margins (like mounts, armor cosmetics, etc) instead of building a new game (or even a substantial expansion) from the ground up. Are you just being willfully ignorant in not seeing the difference in cost/effort between developing a full expansion to sell for $50 vs making a couple new mount models that together sell for $50? Again, the laziness is in shifting the focus because it takes less work and is more economical (good for the company, bad for the consumer).

So no; your claim here doesn't hold up to the reality of the technology of that period.

The tech aspects have been PART of my claim from the beginning. Not sure why you think otherwise. The end result is still the same. Whether companies back then didn't know, didn't want to, or simply were unable to sell and distribute small content additions to games still resulted in the released games being a culmination of the development process.

I'm not sure what you're arguing; if you're trying to say it would be awful to just have DLC for Warcraft 3 being published instead of WoW, as an attack against expansions, then the existence and market presence of WoW seems to directly contradict whatever you're saying.

The presence of WoW SUPPORTS the argument because the argument is that a constant rollout of expansions, DLC's, and mxt TENDS to stifle the development of new games within that franchise. The point was that if they'd done that with WC3 instead and made it the game that the Warcraft franchise revolved around then perhaps we'd never have ended up with WoW.

And hey, if you're the type of guy that is cool with playing WoW till you die then I can certainly see why that would be a positive for you. And while WoW has certainly developed over the years, there's still a comfortable baseline that Blizzard gets to work within that wouldn't be there if they were in a way forced to develop a new Warcraft game from the ground up. Is it good that Blizzard probably never has to come up with another Warcraft game? The way monetization with D4 is shaping up, this might also be the final Diablo game they ever develop. Sure it's mostly speculation, but we went from 3 Warcraft games in 9 years to WoW for 18 years with no end in sight...

Customers don't allow it. Customers prefer it. That's why it's such a successful model. Customers like being able to buy things that way. If they'd rejected the model, it wouldn't be so wildly successful across basically all genres. People really will drop $15 to dress up their avatar. It's really not that different from buying a new set of clothes for your kid's dolls.

I'd argue that people in general are bad at math and bad with money. Microtransactions work in part because it's generally easier to get someone to buy ten $10 items over time rather than one $80 item that may have more substance to it than those ten items combined. Just because it's easier for people to stomach doesn't mean it's a good thing from a consumer health standpoint. And I also imagine you'd run into a lot more push back if something like WoW was marketed as "this game will cost you about $2,000 every 10 years just to play the base version" rather than "it's just $15 per month! Less than a movie!".

I'd also HIGHLY contest the idea that buying digital goods is no different to buying physical goods. Physical items (like clothes and toys) can be passed down, sold, donated, etc. You typically can't do any of those things with digital goods nowadays.

You paid the same amount for the same content. Any distinction exists pretty much entirely in your own head. Wait, no, you probably would've had to wait for the expansions with the first model, and all the content's available Day 3 in the second, making it actually better.

There's a few layers to this one.

First off, if they're selling $60 worth of DLC's at launch you can bet your ass it doesn't stop there, and by the time Game A has released its second $30 expansion two years down the road Game B will have put out a lot more than $120 worth of content.

Secondly, if it's possible, front loading the cost to the customer is in the best interest of the company, not the consumer. It's not going to be the same for everyone, but there will almost certainly be some people who, due to hype or FOMO, will shell out that full $120 to get everything on Game B's launch day, whereas if the content had been spaced out more they might have found a reason to stop playing in the time that those expansions for Game A were being developed and in the end NOT have spent that full $120.

Thirdly, since DLC content being released with the game itself isn't developed by an entire secondary dev team, so you're still paying twice as much for what Game B's dev team had ready by launch day. That extra mount, stash tab, cosmetic helm, and gems didn't take a full separate development team to make. They were made in tandem with all the other mounts, stash tabs, helms, and gems that were being prepared for the base game.

You do see how three WoW mounts each sold for $25 doesn't take the same amount of development resources as a $70 expansion (which likely includes dozens upon dozens of mounts), right? You do understand that the cosmetic armor pieces, wings, and/or mount armor that might be coming out on D4 launch day and sold separately (either in the store or as part of the battle pass) were made at the same time and by the same people who made all the armor pieces, wings, and mount armors that are shipping with the game, right? Do you really think in the grand scheme of budgeting an entire game from the ground up, getting your artists and modelers to make 10 more cosmetic pieces AT THE SAME TIME as they're making the other 200 is going to cost substantially more?

[Endus]

Laziness, as it was clearly explained, is the model by which revenue is shifted towards low effort offerings that provide higher profit margins (like mounts, armor cosmetics, etc) instead of building a new game (or even a substantial expansion) from the ground up. Are you just being willfully ignorant in not seeing the difference in cost/effort between developing a full expansion to sell for $50 vs making a couple new mount models that together sell for $50? Again, the laziness is in shifting the focus because it takes less work and is more economical (good for the company, bad for the consumer).

I'm telling you that cost/effort is not a factor in modern economics in any way whatsoever, other than in setting a floor below which a business is not profitable. Bringing up the relative difference between cost and effort is meaningless. What sets prices is mostly supply and demand, and in the case of MtX specifically, if there's enough demand at a given price point to make selling cosmetics worthwhile, then the market is telling you that you should capitalize on that opportunity to meet that demand.

Effort means less than nothing in this evaluation. If you put a ton of effort into a business venture and can't find a market, that effort means nothing. If you can't price your product high enough to make it worth the time and effort you have to put in and still get sales, your product is a financial failure. Pointing to the effort you made does not mean anything. It doesn't mean anything on that low end, and it certainly doesn't start meaning anything on the upper end.

The presence of WoW SUPPORTS the argument because the argument is that a constant rollout of expansions, DLC's, and mxt TENDS to stifle the development of new games within that franchise. The point was that if they'd done that with WC3 instead and made it the game that the Warcraft franchise revolved around then perhaps we'd never have ended up with WoW.

Starcraft is still the best-selling RTS of all time. The genre fell way off. There's no reason to think continuing Warcraft as an RTS would have come anywhere close to the monumental success WoW turned out to be. I don't see the point in hypothesizing when we can readily tell there weren't any competitors who filled the supposed RTS gap your hypothetical game series would have filled. There were other RTS games, just none nearly as successful as Starcraft. It's not even close. It's not even close with WC3 specifically.

And hey, if you're the type of guy that is cool with playing WoW till you die then I can certainly see why that would be a positive for you. And while WoW has certainly developed over the years, there's still a comfortable baseline that Blizzard gets to work within that wouldn't be there if they were in a way forced to develop a new Warcraft game from the ground up. Is it good that Blizzard probably never has to come up with another Warcraft game? The way monetization with D4 is shaping up, this might also be the final Diablo game they ever develop. Sure it's mostly speculation, but we went from 3 Warcraft games in 9 years to WoW for 18 years with no end in sight...

WoW's changed so drastically, into such a completely different game than it was at launch, that Blizzard made WoW Classic a successful venture. Iterating on an active game isn't that meaningfully different from making an entirely new game, other than that it also preserves that older content in the process.

I'd argue that people in general are bad at math and bad with money. Microtransactions work in part because it's generally easier to get someone to buy ten $10 items over time rather than one $80 item that may have more substance to it than those ten items combined. Just because it's easier for people to stomach doesn't mean it's a good thing from a consumer health standpoint. And I also imagine you'd run into a lot more push back if something like WoW was marketed as "this game will cost you about $2,000 every 10 years just to play the base version" rather than "it's just $15 per month! Less than a movie!".

You're literally describing why microtransactions are popular among consumers. That does mean it's a good thing for consumers.

I'd also HIGHLY contest the idea that buying digital goods is no different to buying physical goods. Physical items (like clothes and toys) can be passed down, sold, donated, etc. You typically can't do any of those things with digital goods nowadays.

Conversely, digital goods never age or fall apart. And the majority of old toys and such aren't worth trading forward, either. Regardless, this is up to the customer to figure out, and I don't see the problem.

There's a few layers to this one.

First off, if they're selling $60 worth of DLC's at launch you can bet your ass it doesn't stop there, and by the time Game A has released its second $30 expansion two years down the road Game B will have put out a lot more than $120 worth of content.

Now you're moving the goalposts. You don't get to just frantically add more to one side of that comparison after the fact and pretend it's the same argument.

Secondly, if it's possible, front loading the cost to the customer is in the best interest of the company, not the consumer. It's not going to be the same for everyone, but there will almost certainly be some people who, due to hype or FOMO, will shell out that full $120 to get everything on Game B's launch day, whereas if the content had been spaced out more they might have found a reason to stop playing in the time that those expansions for Game A were being developed and in the end NOT have spent that full $120.

Still moving goalposts. And I can say for sure I've gone back to older games to play new content. I just reinstalled No Man's Sky to play the expeditions from this last year in their expedition rewind event. I've still got Cyberpunk installed but might not play it till the expansion comes out, but definitely will when it drops. New content has a tendency of bringing players back. You can see this easily with WoW population trackers; there's always a big spike of subscribers with a new expansion release.

Thirdly, since DLC content being released with the game itself isn't developed by an entire secondary dev team, so you're still paying twice as much for what Game B's dev team had ready by launch day. That extra mount, stash tab, cosmetic helm, and gems didn't take a full separate development team to make. They were made in tandem with all the other mounts, stash tabs, helms, and gems that were being prepared for the base game.

For one, you can't possibly argue that. They'd add more people to the primary dev team to work on those features.
For two, so? Even if it's ready at launch, so what? That means nothing. It sure doesn't mean it should all be included in the standard edition price point. That's a claim that has literally no basis in reality.

You do see how three WoW mounts each sold for $25 doesn't take the same amount of development resources as a $70 expansion (which likely includes dozens upon dozens of mounts), right? You do understand that the cosmetic armor pieces, wings, and/or mount armor that might be coming out on D4 launch day and sold separately (either in the store or as part of the battle pass) were made at the same time and by the same people who made all the armor pieces, wings, and mount armors that are shipping with the game, right? Do you really think in the grand scheme of budgeting an entire game from the ground up, getting your artists and modelers to make 10 more cosmetic pieces AT THE SAME TIME as they're making the other 200 is going to cost substantially more?

Of course. But you're going back to "effort". And as I pointed out at the start of this response, effort is absolutely fucking meaningless. You don't set prices based on the "effort" it took to create a product, not once you're past the basic minimum remuneration for making it worth your time in the first place. If people will pay more, even a lot more, the market says you should charge more. That's how market demand works in pricing. You should be bumping a price as high as the market will bear without losing you customer engagement, and even then, it's a matter of how fast you lose that engagement compared to the revenue coming in; a slow decline in engagement offset by much higher profits can make the loss of that fringe of customers totally worth it in the long run.

"Effort" doesn't matter, at all.

[Biomega]

Have the game actually be complete at launch instead of charging $60 and then stuffing the game full of microtransactions as if it were a F2P phone game.

That's not really an answer, just an evasion. "Complete" is a red herring - do you just not want any content updates? Is that it? Back to the Diablo 2 days, with no updates and barely any changes over 20 years?

What you're looking for a single-player game you just finish and then stop playing. But that's just not what this game is or was intended to be, or what most players want. They WANT this game to receive constant updates to make it something you play for years. If you don't want that, cool - but then this is just not the game for you, and never was.

[Fencers]

That's just a bog standard development practice.

No, it isn't.

That's not a standard at all.

[Breader]

Don't buy it? Stick with most indie devs if you don't like the SP/paid cosmetics model. Glad we got that out of the way.

“Not paying” and “not playing” are two separate things.

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“B2P without MTX? Which means no funding and therefore no incentive for ongoing content releases.”

How is this “no funding” when you have to buy it first? This is funding. And it is supposed to last enough to cover any ongoing improvements and bug fixes over the next 2-3 years.

[Endus]

And it is supposed to last enough to cover any ongoing improvements and bug fixes over the next 2-3 years.

This is something you literally pulled out of your own ass. It has no basis in reality.

[Biomega]

How is this “no funding” when you have to buy it first? This is funding. And it is supposed to last enough to cover any ongoing improvements and bug fixes over the next 2-3 years.

Bug fixes aren't content releases. You can't expect a full base game PLUS substantial content for several years just for a single-box price.

What that gets you is D2/D3 - where the ongoing content is minimal, with at best some gimmicky variations in the vein of "you can cube an extra legendary this season!" or "here's 5 new rune words!". That's a very outdated model, and one that most players do not want - D3's "maintenance mode" has become a meme onto itself, and been widely derided by the playerbase.

And that's not even that surprising in terms of business mechanics. If a company gets all your money front-loaded, there's little incentive to actually deliver content. So even if the initial box price DID cover funding for ongoing content updates (and it really doesn't), they already have your money; and so there is a temptation to just phone it in from then on, because even if the content sucks you've already paid for it. That's not a dynamic we should want to encourage, regardless of whether or not it actually manifests.

[Breader]

This is something you literally pulled out of your own ass. It has no basis in reality.

Grow up. This is how computer games worked for 30+ years, before greedy bastards like blizzards and ea entered market

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“If a company gets all your money front-loaded, there's little incentive to actually deliver content”

Exactly. So laws need to be changed to allow 100% reimbursement within 1-2 years if product did not match expectations, regardless of any reasons.

[Biomega]

Grow up. This is how computer games worked for 30+ years

And your point is what, that you want games to be like were 30 years ago?

You're in a tiny minority, then. Games evolve, both as a medium and as an industry. So do gamers. To think that somehow 30 years ago they had it all figured out and never need to change anything is a patently absurd notion right up there with thinking that a few dozen privileged men several hundred years ago perfectly figured out the way government should work forever.

“If a company gets all your money front-loaded, there's little incentive to actually deliver content”

Exactly. So laws need to be changed to allow 100% reimbursement within 1-2 years if product did not match expectations, regardless of any reasons.

Are you for real.

You think you could prove to a court that you weren't satisfied with a product after using it for 2 years?

...I'm being trolled, aren't I. You're just trolling, and I fell for it.

Well played, sir.

[Endus]

Grow up. This is how computer games worked for 30+ years, before greedy bastards like blizzards and ea entered market

That's blatantly false.

The price pays for initial development and marketing. It does not carry any suggestion of further improvements or bug fixes moving forward past the launch version. Things like patches flatly did not exist for console games in particular until consoles started including onboard memory and installing to the system's hard drive, as they had no capacity for writing information to the cartridge or disc.

While further updates and such have become an industry standard, it's not something you're owed as a customer. If a game is released today with a game-breaking bug and that bug is never fixed, nobody who bought the game has any grounds for a legal complaint against the developer; they have not been defrauded in any way.

And companies like EA and Blizzard are providing those free updates. So I really don't have any idea what you're even driving at any more.

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“If a company gets all your money front-loaded, there's little incentive to actually deliver content”

Exactly. So laws need to be changed to allow 100% reimbursement within 1-2 years if product did not match expectations, regardless of any reasons.

This is where you admit that reality does not work that way and you've been making it up.

No. This position of yours is completely ridiculous, which is why no legal system on the planet supports anything of the sort.

[Breader]

“You think you could prove to a court that you weren't satisfied with a product after using it for 2 years?”

I don’t know. What if for two years I had to wait for a promised content update that should have been concluding the story - but it was never released as company always delayed the update date, for two years?

Then again why sue? Idk how it works in your country, in mine you just contact the service provider directly with a complaint and they must respond (facing extra consequences, such as an additional 50% fine on top of everything, if they don’t and case moves to court). It works just that simple.

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That's blatantly false.

The price pays for initial development and marketing. It does not carry any suggestion of further improvements or bug fixes moving forward past the launch version. Things like patches flatly did not exist for console games in particular until consoles started including onboard memory and installing to the system's hard drive, as they had no capacity for writing information to the cartridge or disc.

While further updates and such have become an industry standard, it's not something you're owed as a customer. If a game is released today with a game-breaking bug and that bug is never fixed, nobody who bought the game has any grounds for a legal complaint against the developer; they have not been defrauded in any way.

And companies like EA and Blizzard are providing those free updates. So I really don't have any idea what you're even driving at any more.

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This is where you admit that reality does not work that way and you've been making it up.

No. This position of yours is completely ridiculous, which is why no legal system on the planet supports anything of the sort.

As I said grow up. Games have always been released under a business model where initial sales fund ongoing support and bugfixing. It’s not a crime to not know that though

[Biomega]

Games have always been released under a business model where initial sales fund ongoing support and bugfixing. It’s not a crime to not know that though

But that's not what people are talking about.

They're talking about CONTENT updates. Not support and bug-fixing. Those are very, very different things.