I think the craziest thing is, that the survey starts at 50$. They just assume that must be the minimum prize everyone is ok with.
Lunatics…
Neat trick, isn’t it ?
Seems like they’ve got experience…
What…? That’s 20$ short of the whole game…
$50 is, like, a week of median per-capita household income.
Man, things are a LOT worse in the US than the media makes you believe if the median income is $2600 a year.
Found the American. Your US is a rich small country by population, so US income sizes have virtually zero impact on the world-wide median.
I’m Swedish… A rich small country.
I didn’t realize you were talking global median income, since it was not defined.
I don’t know how great of a barometer for economics a luxury goods/service like a AAA video game is, though.
They ain’t getting a dollar or of me. Didn’t buy D4, what a toxic, problematic company. I miss the classic Blizzard I grew up with, but that comany, it’s talent and passion died in '08.
After everything that’s come out about their work culture and the naked cash grab micro transactions games they are making now, I’m sorta baffled by those still buying Blizz.
I’ve always known blizzard to be like this, although I didn’t really game until around 2010.
The first thing that comes to mind was/is the World of Warcraft subscription cost that still doesn’t include all of the expansions. A base subscription is almost $200 CAD/year alone. They are also now selling mounts at $32 CAD each. Personally, especially if I was paying $200 a year, I wouldn’t want to be pushed to pay even more money for content.
Part of me kind of wishes that I could have seen the era you’re talking about.
It was great when they made Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. I played way too much Warcraft and Warcraft 2, and Starcraft and Diablo were “forbidden fruit” for me since my parents didn’t like M games.
World of Warcraft was the beginning of the end for the Blizzard I used to know. Starcraft 2 started throwing in MTX BS, Hearthstone went full force into MTX, and they just kept adding it to all of their games. If it was just World of Warcraft, I’d give them a pass, but they’ve shown a clear pattern of poor behavior.
They went from being probably my favorite studio (either them or LucasArts; honorable mention to Sierra and Westwood) to being one I actively avoid. Pretty much none of my favorite studios exist anymore, and most of those that do have either changed immensely or have been absorbed by a terrible parent company. The 90s was a magical time for video games imo, lots of great, smaller studios.
Warcraft 3 was great aswell. After completing the campaign, jumping on battle.net for custom games was the most fun i could have back then. Some incredible games on there. It was the bithplace of dota and was what popularised tower defence games thanks to things like pokemaul. There was a full dragonballz rpg with custom character models and it worked really well. So much quality on the custom game bit. And it was all free. (Aside from buying the base game)
World of warcraft though. I dont think i can agree with you. Paying subscriptions was not fun but that game used to be amazing. At the time it was the pinnacle. No mmorpg could compare and none were as popular. And it stayed popular for years. There are very few modern games with the staying power wow had. It was regularly updated, it reflected player feedback, their wants and needs in all its updates. It had real challenges, it spawned so many memes (granted they werent memes at the time)
I played it a lot for a few years. Until it started releasing expansions which cost even more money. Im paying monthly and so are millions of other players. Now you want to sell me an expansion and call it a full game. Burning crusade was ok, litch king was pushing it but beyond that it was basically heres a new place to explore and everything you have done up to this point is irrelevant as there are common green items that are better than you legendaries. Your max level max geared paladin is worth shit now and can be stomped by a level 61 in greens. Nah. No thanks. Then they got so far into these expansions they just reset the base game and made that 1 to 60 grind a cake walk. They even made it so you could skip it all. All the content they spent so much time on, that made the game popular is just a skippable footnote.
And now to top it all they are selling “wow classic” which is the original game with no patches and they have been slowly releasing those patches so the nostalgic amongst us can experience that og game all over again. They can point and say, “hey, i remember that. Cool.”
Deplorable company.
I probably would’ve liked Warcraft 3, but I dismissed it since it focused on heroes instead of the RTS feel they had with the first two.
And yeah, my wife loved WoW at a kid, but eventually it got to be too expensive for the time she had to spend with it (i.e. when she went to college). I personally never really liked MMOs so I didn’t play WOW (had friends that did though), but I did my time with RuneScape. I mostly played FPS and RTS games, and Blizzard games fit pretty well.
I think what happened is that WoW was so successful that Blizzard got addicted to making money instead of making good games. So over time, their focus on making their games more profitable made them less and less attractive to me. I think I played Hearthstone for two weeks until I realized how much of a money grab it is, and I just stopped carrying about their other games. They lost what made them special to me.
Did the blizzard people start a new company?
They must’ve gone on to something better.
There’s been a few studios from former Blizzard employees. Just yesterday I got an update about Stormgate which is being made by Frost Giant Games. There’s also Dreamhaven, Gas Giant Games, and notorious studios.
Nice! Thanks for the info
Many have just retired early. They made bank.
Do you know the names of the people who made what you like? Maybe if you follow them and not the company brand you find what “died”.
Ghostcrawler is heading up a new MMO, probably a couple years out though
Not sure what Jeff Kaplan is up to, probably retired and I wouldn’t blame him
I’m hoping the collective answer is: “stop smoking crack”.
Who is playing Diablo 4? Especially this year.
I mean, I checked it out at launch, thought it was fine, didn’t even finish the main campaign, moved on to the other million great games that came out the past few months. Is this game still relevant?
I’m playing season two. It’s quite decent, a good game for me to decompress. TBH I played pre-season until WT4 and stopped at level 79. This season is much more streamlined and I’m currently on level 75 after 1/3 of the time played vs my pre-season char. I’ll give Last Epoch a whirl after beating all the endgame bosses.
Fair enough. D3 took a while to click for me, too, and it only did once they turned it into basically an idle game or digital bubble wrap. D4 felt a bit more MMO-y and I wasn’t there for it, but I always figured they’d get to making it more D3-ish eventually and I could check it out again then.
And then the best year of gaming in a decade happened and I forgot D4 even existed. But I don’t resent anybody who stuck with it. I bet I would have given it more of a go under different circumstances.
I feel ya on the MMOishness of D4. When you’re doing an event and all of a sudden a 100 level guy comes in and destroys everything in 0.5 second it can ruin the immersion somewhat.
Yea, I only played D4 again after finishing Starfield, BG3, AC6 (till NG++), and AW2 (definitely will play again when the NG+ dropped).
Rant
I’ve always been of the “vote with your dollar” or “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” mentality until recently. Now it seems like the heavy concentration of market power into a few companies is spurring on the continued development of “pricing innovations”.
Remember when they said digital distribution would make the games cheaper and they would pass the savings down to us? (surprise that was a lie). That’s just the cost of innovation.
Diablo 4 isn’t a “bad game” but for games as a service that contains microtransactions, it certainly isn’t a game worth a $100 expansion pack. They didn’t even include the game with the collectors edition. Sell the collectibles without the game for a premium! Get paid twice! Innovation!
As more and more disappointments land face first on the concrete floor of the empty swimming pool surrounded by apathetic"entitled " gamers they still will not learn from their mistakes because the money says otherwise. They would rather go out of business then sell you a product you actually want to buy. That’s the cost of innovation.
I don’t know if this is the right place to say this. I urge everyone to collect physical copies of games, back them up, share them and archive them. We’re never getting back what we’ve lost no matter how much we’re willing to pay for it.
Relative to the cost of everything else / inflation, games actually were pretty cheap. They had been $50/60 for nearly 30 years. Now we’re in the shitty time where it’s $70 for the base game, $30 for day 1 dlc, battlepasses, micro (really macro) transactions, etc.
Yes that is true.
Games were cheap for a long time. It was a competitive market. When the N64 came out, game cartridges were 80$ in the US (depending on the title). Neo Geo games were $200 a cartridge new before that. The prices resembled a (arguably) higher quality item.
The Sony PlayStation had games typically around the $30 to $40 dollar price point and that enabled Sony to sell endless copies of Blasto and other (arguably shovelware) games at the time. This loss leader strategy Sony had destabilized a lot of the market. Systems makers had to lower the price of games to increase the install base and they constantly lost money (sega Saturn games used to sell as low as 10$ new in 1997).
$70, $80, even $120 Dollars for a triple A title like Elden Ring or Super Mario Galaxy wouldn’t be that crazy to me depending on the state of that market. Some people are buying OG PlayStation games like MegaMan Legends in excess of $200. In the end though, you have the game. It is your copy.
The wake up call for me was when Microsoft has to be shamed into walking back their weird anti consumer Xbox game cd key sharing policy because Sony made this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
anyone who didn’t uninstall battlenet after the Blitzchung nonsense gets the DLC they fucking deserve
Who wants to pay $100 to run into a thousand cellars?
After reading a story about bg3 patch 5 adding an epilogue set 6 months after the games end with over 3500 new lines of dialogue, new cutscenes which is based on the thousands of decisions you made in your playthrough and different for everyone and its just a patch and its free. This makes me so mad that blizzard have become this shit hole of a company.
that was probably going to be in the base game but they released it without itanyway. wish obsidian did that for new vegas instead of a stupid slideshow 😂
Maybe it was but you know if it was any other comapny rhry would have charged for it and it woild be broken still.
What?
First of all, after the shitshow that was the launch of D4, that’s just hilarious. S2 is certainly better than the start, but it is no holy grail that magically fixed everything.
Secondly, you’re dreaming if you think a DLC is worth more than the base game.
And finally, I like how they’re “asking” players if they’d “be okay” with it. Are you telling me that if the majority of the player base said “NO!” they’d actually listen? If there is anyone who believes that, well I’ve got a bridge in Sanctuary to sell you.
Depending on how extreme the NO! answers are, they may delay it or split the 100$ DLC in 2 50$ DLC, which you both have to get to actually play the game.
I think you mean 2 $70 DLCs because “the $100 was a discounted bundle” now available for $120.
I’ll play D4 if and when it’s free. Otherwise I’m not interested.
That would probably make me less likely to play it, because then there’d be even more MTX crap. I’m just not interested at any price.
Sure, but it won’t cost me anything to try at that point, and if it sucks, so be it.
I guess.
But those types of games tend to be manipulative and giant wastes of time. I pretty much just avoid F2P games as a general rule, because if they don’t think their game is worth charging money for, neither do I. The likelihood that a F2P game is worth my time is very low, so I don’t bother playing them.
Diablo 4 isn’t that good of a game and not even close to the best arpg. I admittedly got hosed on buying it at launch and am not giving them more money. Why would I spend over 150$ total to get the equivalent of 1 mediocre game assuming they fix all the bs. Definitely regret the purchase at this point, and if a fixed version is going to be locked behind absurdly priced dlc in the future I feel like I got scammed twice.
Honestly I’d like them to release enough content to make me feel like I didn’t waste my original purchase price, maybe I just am wanting for Diablo 1/2 days :(
Diabo 2 remaster is still really good
Other than that, il just wait for poe 2
Vomit. Blizzard gets worse and worse. Good ole capitalism.
It encourages innovation
Blizzard hasn’t done shit for innovation for a very long time
No
Ahh, this must be where the laid off Bungie employees went to.
