uanime5 said:
Also the Diablo 3 auction house was closed because it made it too easy to improve the gear of your characters without playing the game, not because it was unpopular (there's still a campaign to bring it back). Given that you could buy things using the in game currency it's clear that this auction house isn't an example of trying to get as much real money from players as possible.
No, it most certainly was. Balance changes were made in reaction to inflation on the market in which for people who played on their own, got royally screwed by the changes.
It was about generating more income than Blizzard deserved and the RMAH was the core of many of their damaging decisions.
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I watch an awful lot of GDC content that I can get my hands on at GDCVault. It's depressing that whenever I go into 2013's ADC (App-Developers Conference, a sister conference specifically for the mobile market) that 60% or more of the panels consist of nothing but monetization, whales, and how to game the Google Play and iTunes top charts.
I'm pretty disappointed that GDC core is showing similar panels now too. I understand that games have to make money, but when you're relying on whales, and you're actively trying to mitigate backlash instead of not causing it in the first place, then you aren't exactly working with your customers, merely trying to drain them dry before "the competition" does.
I used to spend a pretty penny into Free-to-Play games. I don't think I made it to "whale" status, but I did pay a lot, much more than I would a subscription game and after I realized how much I was paying versus what I was getting, I just stopped and find myself adverse to free-to-play games or games with cash shops in it's entirety.
I feel like I was taken advantage of by these types of business models, and frankly I believe it to be that way. I paid a lot of money and in the end got nothing by it outside of escaping some inconveniences that the developers intentionally made in their game to make it suck enough for me to pay that money.
I do still dabble in
Path of Exile and pay them money because they have made a game that doesn't rely on the "Whale" methodology by damaging their game, but rather making a game that is loved after the let-down that was
Diablo III.
I want to try
Wildstar, but with the combination of up front box-cost, subscription fee
and a cash shop? That tells me a few things:
Box-Cost and Subscription isn't enough to keep the doors open and pay for development. This is an indication that they set their budgets too high.
The cash shop is supposedly for "cosmetics" only, but who the hell actually believes they'll stay cosmetic? I sure as hell don't. They'll be looking for a way to quietly find and spear the whales with this so they can take in more cash. If the option to screw people is there, it'll be taken. There's a tiny number of studios that won't and only one of them has any sort of fame.
The cash shop shows that the developers/publisher is trying to hedge their bets. This tells me that they inherently do not have faith in their game and that they are already prepared
before launch to change over to a free to play model. This isn't a great way to get me wanting to invest long-term in an MMO.
Needless to say, it feels like all these things are ignored, if just for the sake of spearing the whales while they are there. Publishers and the business development crews need to remember that they are pissing off and poisoning their customers, their sources of income.