There IS a way to get this out of games, but it won’t happen. People would actually need to NOT purchase things from companies that display this behaviour, the games included.
You’d like to think that, but the entire industry is currently collapsing in upon itself because they’ve spent so long doubling and tripling down on things that nobody was buying already. They won’t even think twice about driving beloved studios off a cliff in the pursuit of their corporate wet dreams.
I wish I could not buy something twice.
Of course, a mount like this would have been part of an achievement or an in-game event. Now its just “open your wallets”
I would like to see a law that simply states anything purchasable in a game, must be able to be earned in the game with a reasonable level of effort compared to the sale value of the item. Whales would still whale, but fish could hunt down the stuff they want.
The simplest formula would be the dollar value divided by the fed min wage. So a $35 item would be about 5 hours. So it must take the average player 5 hours to obtain it, or less.
Or maybe we just need to stop buying shit that’s just thinly veiled skinner boxes, and play games because they are fun again, not to get the best/coolest/most brag-worthy stuff in-game.
Corkysnog’s suggestion would make it actually brag-worthy. Just being rich in real life doesn’t necessarily require effort. I’m way more impressed by a full endgame set in Diablo II.
I could see developers slowly shifting their models so that they actually star planning out more free only items that take ridiculous amounts of time to achieve, purely for the rarity. Because then you just open a trading shop and take a cut of each sale. Stratify the items and make them excessively rare and you make money on the f2p to whale economy.
That sounds like the Diablo 3 auction house. It was very unpopular and they eventually shut it down. It broke the core game loop by replacing “kill monsters for cool stuff” with “do anything to get gold, and hit fantasy eBay” or, for people with less self control, “hit fantasy eBay with your wallet in hand”
Oh I don’t see the need to loop in game currency to it. Just have a regular shop. Anything that is purchasable is going to sell for less, and everything else, well that depends. Yeah, it’s not ideal, ideally I would want everything to be free/tied to in game currency that you can’t purchase.
They’re winding the game down and trying to milk the whales as much as possible before they stop supporting it
There’s like at least one xpac coming down that will somewhat revitalize the game, support won’t end tomorrow.
This is just blizz squeezing for more money, like every other game with an MTX shop.
I, admittedly, don’t play Diablo 4. But I know they have “seasons.” Is there new content released with each season that you don’t have to pay for? If so, I would thank microtransactions for that and the people who pay so you get new content without paying.
The season is a battle pass. The paid tier is all cosmetic, but the prices on the shop are so ridiculous. This game should have been free to play. But Blizzard is so greedy now, even with WoW Classic fueling their traditional subscription cash cow more than it has been for a while. It’s sad to see the decline of this once-awesome company.
I bought D4 recently when it went on sale, and it is pretty fun, but I would not recommend paying full price.
The season is a battle pass.
I’m not sure what this means, as I suspect it means different things for each game. However, a quick look at the way Diablo 4, it does look like they add content with the pass, and I don’t see anything about having to purchase it, but I could be wrong. But if I was getting a constant stream of content for free and the only penalty is that I couldn’t get some meaningless cosmetic item, I would be happy not furious.
Also, I don’t recommend paying full price for any* game because they all go on sale eventually. I just drop any game I want into my wish list and then when it eventually drops under 20 bucks on steam, I buy it.
- I will happily pay full price for indy games. And I also don’t always follow this rule, like I did just buy BG3 for full price.
Battle pass means you play the game to earn rewards on a track of levels. There are two tracks, free and premium. Everyone gets the free. If you want the premium track as well, you must purchase the premium battle pass, which in D4 I think is $25.
Ok, but this is a stupid example. This is something you buy for the 7000 platinum and get the horse for free.
The horse looks like shit though and you shouldn’t buy that much platinum.
And 7000 platinum is worth how much in irl currency? It’s not mental gymnastics, you know?
Not sure what you mean?
You said you spend the 7000 platinum and it comes for free. It’s an abstraction layer above buying it for 7000 platinum. Platinum can be bought for real life currency. So, it’s just another abstraction layer above just spending money to get the in-game item.
If you can’t wrap your head around this, you’re either oblivious to the world ,or a troll
No this is you spend $65 and you get 7000 platinum plus the horse. So it’s basically a discount on platinum. Implying this is $65 for a horse is misleading.
Otherwise you’re right, the platinum is a manipulation to make people feel like they are not spending money.
Oh, my bad then. My fault for only reading headlines
