Not really the same takeaway I got. If the amount of mid to low spenders is consistent, then it's not that there's more average spenders at smaller games, it's just that there's fewer whales.
Now I know what its like when Ungood and I go on and on.
I'm not sure if others already answered your cash shop question, but honestly it can be very difficult to simply how this game's p2w works.
You can do base activities but their drop rates are very very very low without crests. There are 2 types of crests: rare (usually given for free from playing) and legendary (usually paid but supposedly sometimes free). The goal of either crests is to get legendary gems, which have different ratings (1-5) and only 5 star can be upgraded fully to unlock a slot which can house another 5 star gem. Rare crests increase the chance of getting a legendary gem by a bit but only cap at 2 stars for gems that drop. Legendary crests guarantee a legendary gem which can be between 2-5 and a 5 star is guaranteed after 50 legendary crests. You'll need the less gems to upgrade whichever 5 star and the 5 star that you want to put on the upgraded 5 star needs to be different. I think its 100 dollars for 45 legendary crests (so a bit over 100 to guarantee a 5 star gem). The benefits are supposedly an increase of 50% per gem per piece of gear (6 gear slots) so you're looking at an increase of 300% from a person able to do all of that, which is estimated to be in the 6 figure range for directly paying.
The real problem is that many activities become dependent on your gear so you'd eventually hit a wall even if you were just someone that did the battle pass + boon. So ultimately, f2p and people paying for the bare minimum aren't GREATLY different in terms of power over time as someone who spends maybe a thousand a month.
I understand about paying something but what's the 'right' number when people saying 'they need to make money.'
So... we talking actually predatory or are people being overly dramatic again?
Like, I only touched the game for an hour or so (like.... a wizard and necro at level 11 each), but... where's the predatory mtx?
I saw cosmetics and..... that was it. There was like, something about legendary crests or w/ever but literally that's the only other thing I saw. Then again, I don't exactly tend to go scrutinizing every single pixel looking for something to scream about, to put it bluntly .
Well if you didn't actually look at it properly how would you know that people are looking for things to scream about. You're just oblivious is all and have not even bothered to watch the videos explaining the monetization therefore an uninformed person casting aspersions on those of us who have bothered to watch and learn about it. Good luck in your oblivion, hope it works out for you.
Pro tip, sometips it possible to be "too" informed, and sets people to worrying about things that they'll very likely be impacted by.
It's also possible to form intelligent decisions without watch lots of videos, spent most of my life doing so.
Heck, I've even installed toilets without ever looking at a video on the internet and found my way to places in far away lands without a map, nevermind GPS.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
It's an inferior version of Diablo + cash shop. If anyone wants to play that not my problem.
This was all that needed to be said.
It wasn't a game built for fans to enjoy. It was a game built to put fans in the path of microtransactions.
The folks saying "well you can just play the story and not spend a dime!" strike me as downright foolish. Have you... ever heard of the franchise before now? Do you... Even know what keeps Diablo games going past the first 3 months post release? It's not replaying it over and over for the story!
No, Blizzard knew their fans were the fans that like loot progression, and they made damn sure the cash shop hurt for those very fans.
So Diablo fans are loot progression addicts and Blizzard decided to take advantage of them.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
It's an inferior version of Diablo + cash shop. If anyone wants to play that not my problem.
This was all that needed to be said.
It wasn't a game built for fans to enjoy. It was a game built to put fans in the path of microtransactions.
The folks saying "well you can just play the story and not spend a dime!" strike me as downright foolish. Have you... ever heard of the franchise before now? Do you... Even know what keeps Diablo games going past the first 3 months post release? It's not replaying it over and over for the story!
No, Blizzard knew their fans were the fans that like loot progression, and they made damn sure the cash shop hurt for those very fans.
So Diablo fans are loot progression addicts and Blizzard decided to take advantage of them.
"It’s funny that we still refer to Diablo as an RPG, even though we all know the role-playing part is not, and never has been, the draw. (My friends and I used to play a meta game where we raced each other to see who could skip dialogue and cutscenes the fastest.) Sure, there’s some “role-play” in leveling up your character and choosing which attacks look the coolest. But Blizzard has not even bothered to include that as Diablo Immortal’s main selling point. Its genre description in the Apple Store doesn’t even have “RPG” or “role-play” in it. Instead, the genre is “Loot, Customize, and Explore,” and the most important part is the first word — loot. After all, that’s what Blizzard is going to be getting."
Not really the same takeaway I got. If the amount of mid to low spenders is consistent, then it's not that there's more average spenders at smaller games, it's just that there's fewer whales.
Whales will simply go to games catering more to them.
Yeah, some games are just not that aggressively monetized and/or don't really give much incentive. It's kinda supported by the observation of whales being the pay group that increases as game profit does. Casts the others into being only marginal profits at best, which cycles around that subject of limited buying power and voice.
Guys, please. It's fine to like the game. It's fine to enjoy the game. Cool! Awesome! I'm happy that you enjoy the game. When you gloss over the complaints people have about the MTX in the game? You are not helping yourself, or the other players. You are only helping the corporations who are not going to thank you for telling people how great their game is at the expense of having egregious monetization in the game.
The point people make about things like the gem system for example; even if they were intending on going hardcore and the gem was free they probably won't min-max it either. You're not going to. But if it wasn't gated by horrid monetary systems, you'd have the option to. That's it. That's the point. Cosmetic MTX is fine. Having actual gameplay systems influenced behind how much money you spend though? It's effectively saying that in order to go "Hey, I have a lot of free time and love this game; I might go hard into the paint for it," that you can't because you can not be f2p anymore to do so.
Let's make a hypothetical example. Look at it Overwatch. It's a fun game, people love it. You a Brigitte main, can drop in and play casual, or you can go real, real hard into it and who knows what happens. Maybe you go pro, wind up in the Shanghai Dragons or some new team being featured in a cinderella story. But then Blizzard goes "We're adding a new item to the game! For the low-low price, of a thousand dollars; you can buy this shield that removes the cooldown timer on Brigitte's charge so you can just keep shield bashing people to death." You can't go competitive now; because if your competitive team does not have that shield, you just lose. That option of going competitive in the game has been stripped by your hands because you do not have that one gameplay influencing item that blizzard is selling.
Love the game. Enjoy the game. Stop getting in the way of the people though who'd like to not be reminded that we have lost the war against abhorrent microtransaction systems because of the people who enable these abhorrent microtransactions by either participating in them or downplaying them in favor of the "good," of the game so that more people are forced to suffer or also participate in them. You're not helping yourself. You're not helping your friends. You're not helping your community. You are only helping the publishers (not even the devs) who decided on nickel and diming you just because you want to try other systems in a game.
Not certain what extra revenue offhand you are wanting to account for beyond "per paying user". Are non-paying users generating revenue too? If you're talking about profits from user transactions, that's "paying users". We could talking about business deals, but that's not exactly talking about profit generated by game itself any more.
You can say "but these games may be making more overall" with that total revenue argument, but that begs the reiteration that the difference between the top earning games and the rest of F2P isn't the amount of average to low paying users, but an increase in high paying ones into the top 5%. You'd have to see a massive increase of users recorded in those lower ARPPU games for their total revenue to exceed the high ARPPU games, let alone match them. This hasn't been shown to be the case.
Also not sure what the LoL example is meant to show. That game has an ARPPU of ~$35 and an ARPU of ~$1.32. It's middling between the average and the top 5% for mobile, and we could even bring up Wild Rift or Legends of Runeterra as counterpoint which have both eclipsed LoL in total revenue. And both of those can be calculated with a higher ARPPU that directly relates to their in-app purchases recorded to the Play and App store.
LoL also still gets a large chunk of it's profits from whales, though they at least monetized themselves in a way that limits influence on the core game and doesn't drag any kind of progression into a decade long activity, it's mostly just people paying thousands for cosmetics. I have less ability to comment on Wild Rift or Legends of Runeterra about exactly how they are monetized.
You'd have to see a massive increase of users recorded in those lower ARPPU games for their total revenue to exceed the high ARPPU games, let alone match them. This hasn't been shown to be the case.
That's what I was getting at: top 5% ARRPU does not necessarily mean large profits. A game can get large profits either through whales or through massine numbers of regular spenders. Kitarad's article proves neither.
I would point out it's easier to get a finite number paying more than attract and maintain a large number to pay more. Kitarad's article does mention that with the statement "But despite this growth in spend amongst the very highest spenders, the top 25%, median, and bottom performers have remained the same. This essentially means that players already spending big are prepared to spend even more, but they're not necessarily doing so in a wider pool of titles."
This also relates to the point that the shift isn't stated to be generally happening outside the top spenders, which reduces the probability of many players feeding the revenue versus said whales.
Which also leads into the other post and your link about LoL. Statists mentions in its description the fact the revenue comes to in part from tournaments and sponsorships. Main reason I crossed out that prior statement in my post.
There is a large difference between what users are paying, and what Riot earns off LoL from corporate sponsorships and tournament deals. You can look at Overwatch (prior to Blizz' sponsorship crash) to find a similar situation for reported earnings. Was hoping I could find a good resource for that, but I've only found one article asserting Overwatch was ~$800 mil last year. As of this year Blizz' quarterly earnings are coming up short, even though Overwatch has seen more players recently thanks to Overwatch 2 testing and news. Big chunk of that loss in revenue is lost corporate sponsorships.
Relevant to the subject and similarly evoking the point of "details matter, because LoL shares that nature of a massive chunk of it's reported revenue, not being from players or it's ARPPU as a result. We would have to dive into the breakdown of the games revenue to know that division better.
I do certainly agree that high ARPPU is not inherently an indication of bad monetization or evil. There are certainly ways to monetize games that can actually be mechanically beneficial to a game. It's just considerably less common to see it done.
I thought having a PC version would be enough for me to be able to play it. Turns out even the PC version is really bad and boring. The UI is not at all adapted for PC and the game in general is really boring.
I created a Necromancer for my 1st (and only) character and was very unpleasantly surprised to find out the character starts with a retarded-looking scythe, and a shield that both look like very high end epic gear and my character also had two minions to fight for her right from the start.
Compared to the Necromancer from Diablo 2 that only started with a stupid knife and a Summon Skeleton ability that required you to kill something first really makes Diablo Immortal look bad and lazy.
It really feels like it was made for some mobile audience that never played Diablo 1 or 2 and don't care how true Immortal is to the previous games. It also feels like the game is a middle finger to all Diablo veterans.
I'm not mentioning Diablo 3, because it is not really a Diablo game, and Diablo 4 will also not be a Diablo game.
You'd have to see a massive increase of users recorded in those lower ARPPU games for their total revenue to exceed the high ARPPU games, let alone match them. This hasn't been shown to be the case.
That's what I was getting at: top 5% ARRPU does not necessarily mean large profits. A game can get large profits either through whales or through massine numbers of regular spenders. Kitarad's article proves neither.
I would point out it's easier to get a finite number paying more than attract and maintain a large number to pay more. Kitarad's article does mention that with the statement "But despite this growth in spend amongst the very highest spenders, the top 25%, median, and bottom performers have remained the same. This essentially means that players already spending big are prepared to spend even more, but they're not necessarily doing so in a wider pool of titles."
This also relates to the point that the shift isn't stated to be generally happening outside the top spenders, which reduces the probability of many players feeding the revenue versus said whales.
Which also leads into the other post and your link about LoL. Statists mentions in its description the fact the revenue comes to in part from tournaments and sponsorships. Main reason I crossed out that prior statement in my post.
There is a large difference between what users are paying, and what Riot earns off LoL from corporate sponsorships and tournament deals. You can look at Overwatch (prior to Blizz' sponsorship crash) to find a similar situation for reported earnings. Was hoping I could find a good resource for that, but I've only found one article asserting Overwatch was ~$800 mil last year. As of this year Blizz' quarterly earnings are coming up short, even though Overwatch has seen more players recently thanks to Overwatch 2 testing and news. Big chunk of that loss in revenue is lost corporate sponsorships.
Relevant to the subject and similarly evoking the point of "details matter, because LoL shares that nature of a massive chunk of it's reported revenue, not being from players or it's ARPPU as a result. We would have to dive into the breakdown of the games revenue to know that division better.
I do certainly agree that high ARPPU is not inherently an indication of bad monetization or evil. There are certainly ways to monetize games that can actually be mechanically beneficial to a game. It's just considerably less common to see it done.
I mentioned before that rising underclass of players spending small amounts, I do wonder if that has not spurred whales to spend even more. These players are "sardines" when it comes to spending, but if you as a whale see more people with outfits are you not inclined to buy more outfits? If you as a whale see increased prices at an auction house due to sardines doing some spending will you not spend more? But this may just be a blip in the overall picture which is obscured by the obscene amounts of money whales are putting in.
Indeed, making you point broader, cash shops and monetization are not a bad thing, it is just that we have seen them march slowly but relentlessly to exploitative over the years. Thats why a favour a sub, but it is not as if a cash shop intrinsically cannot be fair.
straight unplayable on my computer, works on my phone, apparently something to do with HDR incompatibility
seeing it played on twitch streams, cant just imagine why anyone would play this over lost ark. its worse than most f2p games, in like a lot of ways
This "mobile" game has better story, characters, voice over, itemization and overall world than Lost Ark. So I can easily understand why people play this game over Lost Ark on pc.
there's some weird delusional disconnect where people try to infer in any way this game is better than lost ark, on any level.
i play a lot of mobile games, so no, its not anywhere near on par or on the level of other mobile games. so your cop out of "its mobile" doesn't work,
this game is like 3 days old, so dont sit here pretending you understand fully the itemization, end game, or meta or anything remotely complex about this 3 day old game.
i've played this game, and i can say, no, the characters, voice work, and story are not better. please give some examples of this amazing itemization that revolutionizes the mmo genre.
Thats why a favour a sub, but it is not as if a cash shop intrinsically cannot be fair.
Fair means different things to different people. I'd argue it's irrelevant. Some (most) think fair is having only cosmetics, others do not like even that, because they want cosmetics ie as bragging rights or part of the price. Some think convenience (ie bag space) is ok, others don't. Most believe an only sub scheme is fair, but you will get the odd guy that says it favors those with more time.
For example, in LoL people complain about having to buy or grind champions or runepages. You will always see complaints.
You have been in these forums for a long time, I am sure you saw threads like this and know it's true.
Which is why I trust only numbers and metrics, not opinions. This is also why I consider the P2W term to be completely nonsensical.
Well there are limits to interpretations and discussions. When a bought item makes you more powerful than the F2P guy, then IT IS P2W. No discussion.
Playing the game. It is fine. I don't buy P2W and will play until I can't anymore.
Too much complaining with no ideas. If people would not buy the P2W, and it shows them that, maybe that will stop it. Fat chance. Look at Star Citizen - 10 years, no official game and people throwing money at it.
Thats why a favour a sub, but it is not as if a cash shop intrinsically cannot be fair.
Fair means different things to different people. I'd argue it's irrelevant. Some (most) think fair is having only cosmetics, others do not like even that, because they want cosmetics ie as bragging rights or part of the price. Some think convenience (ie bag space) is ok, others don't. Most believe an only sub scheme is fair, but you will get the odd guy that says it favors those with more time.
For example, in LoL people complain about having to buy or grind champions or runepages. You will always see complaints.
You have been in these forums for a long time, I am sure you saw threads like this and know it's true.
Which is why I trust only numbers and metrics, not opinions. This is also why I consider the P2W term to be completely nonsensical.
Well there are limits to interpretations and discussions. When a bought item makes you more powerful than the F2P guy, then IT IS P2W. No discussion.
You are quite right that fair to P2W is a scale which no two players will totally agree on. I always hold up cosmetics as something that we don't have to worry about and that is a pretty universal opinion, but some posters on here will pull me up on that.
But like Eoloe says some things in a cash shop are so weighted you have a hard time finding players who don't think that item is pay to win. I am not sure how you can use numbers and metrics to make a better decision? It is down to your personnel framework of what you think is fair, the playerbase arrives at its conclusions on the basis of where the weight of individual opinions and media articles settle, rightly or wrongly.
Thats why a favour a sub, but it is not as if a cash shop intrinsically cannot be fair.
Fair means different things to different people. I'd argue it's irrelevant. Some (most) think fair is having only cosmetics, others do not like even that, because they want cosmetics ie as bragging rights or part of the price. Some think convenience (ie bag space) is ok, others don't. Most believe an only sub scheme is fair, but you will get the odd guy that says it favors those with more time.
For example, in LoL people complain about having to buy or grind champions or runepages. You will always see complaints.
You have been in these forums for a long time, I am sure you saw threads like this and know it's true.
Which is why I trust only numbers and metrics, not opinions. This is also why I consider the P2W term to be completely nonsensical.
It's almost like slicing up a game to sell in pieces inherently means you have to screw a certain type of gamer.
Funny how that works. Almost like selling these things piecemeal is a poor decision in the first place.
I got my PC issues sorted out plays much better w/ a controller for me. I made it to level 31 so far as a necro and I only bought a $5 battle pass. I havent dug into the whole gem thing yet, but I saw an article where they estimated the cost to be $110,000 to fully kit out w/ max level gems. I do not think I have died yet or even been close with just in game gear. There is a challenge rift with different stages which I am only on 4 now and I think there are 30 something. The difficulty amps up w/ each stage on that so maybe p2w gear would matter for that?
I got my PC issues sorted out plays much better w/ a controller for me. I made it to level 31 so far as a necro and I only bought a $5 battle pass. I havent dug into the whole gem thing yet, but I saw an article where they estimated the cost to be $110,000 to fully kit out w/ max level gems. I do not think I have died yet or even been close with just in game gear. There is a challenge rift with different stages which I am only on 4 now and I think there are 30 something. The difficulty amps up w/ each stage on that so maybe p2w gear would matter for that?
Well I am not putting a $5 spend into the abusive section, but I think we can all agree if you spend anything north of $100 just to get up to scratch in the first few weeks of the game that's abusive.
I would point out BDO's monetization has changed several times. Like the type of rewards, the scaling of progression, even cash shop items all have been tweaked by Pearl Abyss since moving back to self-publishing. Even before that, Kakao had to move many items that were behind paywalls into rewards you could actually earn through play.
Yeah, just the point that BDO wasn't just fine or otherwise. They were called on poor practices, because they had poor practices.
Just a bit of the extension that these companies do have to be called on these things and people do have to be aware of them, because they have less incentive to change if users simply are unaware and invest up to the point of butting up against buyer's remorse or otherwise.
Kinda delays the whole adapting bit as long as they can still draw people in long enough. Can argue that maybe that's because that game is "good enough" that people don't mind, but it's also that offset that we'd discussed before about how costs ramp up over time and allows things like buyer's remorse and sunk cost to become a thing, which makes the situation all the more muddled.
That's also a bit of a problem of miscommunication.
A lot of the conflict in this thread can be summarized in a very similar way, for example, to how Korrigan was arguing with others in the other thread.
Certainly you can say that Group B finds no relevance in the subject Group A is calling out, but that doesn't mean there's not an issue. The "noise" is functionally just two groups looking at two different parts of the user experience.
Additionally, if Group B only expects to enjoy a part of the game and fall off before running into the problems Group A is looking at, that also speaks to the subject of Group B not being the target audience of the game's design.
Which brings relevance back to the subject of Group A who are looking at the game as something they (or those they are looking at) are expecting to play for a longer duration where the concerns crop up.
I do feel sunk cost has a place there personally, because it nests itself directly into that ramping cost design. You got a $0.99 investment upfront, then a $5, then $10. Certainly some people like you may say "this is my fixed cost for the game", but there's also plenty who aren't even thinking that deeply about cost. It's simply the subject of convenience, which results in the later sunk cost.
Not always about factoring for personal approach, but what other common habits and trends may result in.
Sure, but as others have pointed out before that confusion can be cleared up somewhat by answering one question.
"What kind of games and focus in play has the Diablo franchise been known for?"
When a series has been lauded for years for it's loot systems, itemization, and progression mechanics, and for the last few years has relied very directly on maintaining recurring users not through expansion of narrative content, but of progression mechanic and seasonal gear rotation, then it makes for a rather obvious case to be made about who the expected audience of Immortal is.
And it's not the people who are going to casually play the campaign, do a few rifts, and fall off as they hit the paywall (or sooner). It's the people that are looking to it as a sequel to the previous titles as a progression-focused experience.
Which brings much of the relevance to the subject of how those mechanics are treated.
You can argue about misguided self-importance, but that also draws attention to the subject in the opposing direction. Dismissal of a subject because it's seen as being of little importance by another can make it seem like "lots of noise and little signal".
But is that actually the case, or is that just the imposed perception?
Take the BDO example. It's a generally well-received game, and certainly it has found success. But not by dismissing problems as "lots of noise and little signal". Instead, it was heeded, and they adapted.
Even many games we can look at in the mobile market tend to do little things to adapt. Gacha games frequently run events to toss out freebie kickback rewards in order to stem off loss of free and even paying players to the usual paid mechanics. Mobile ARPGs like Immortal will throw free item sets and pieces at users every so often to stave off the burn of the progression gating. There's an awareness there that the core mechanics are distasteful, and they have to turn around and apply some salve every so often.
Comments
It's also possible to form intelligent decisions without watch lots of videos, spent most of my life doing so.
Heck, I've even installed toilets without ever looking at a video on the internet and found my way to places in far away lands without a map, nevermind GPS.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
https://www.polygon.com/23152323/diablo-immortal-mobile-free-to-play-microtransactions-addictive
"It’s funny that we still refer to Diablo as an RPG, even though we all know the role-playing part is not, and never has been, the draw. (My friends and I used to play a meta game where we raced each other to see who could skip dialogue and cutscenes the fastest.) Sure, there’s some “role-play” in leveling up your character and choosing which attacks look the coolest. But Blizzard has not even bothered to include that as Diablo Immortal’s main selling point. Its genre description in the Apple Store doesn’t even have “RPG” or “role-play” in it. Instead, the genre is “Loot, Customize, and Explore,” and the most important part is the first word — loot. After all, that’s what Blizzard is going to be getting."
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
The point people make about things like the gem system for example; even if they were intending on going hardcore and the gem was free they probably won't min-max it either. You're not going to. But if it wasn't gated by horrid monetary systems, you'd have the option to. That's it. That's the point. Cosmetic MTX is fine. Having actual gameplay systems influenced behind how much money you spend though? It's effectively saying that in order to go "Hey, I have a lot of free time and love this game; I might go hard into the paint for it," that you can't because you can not be f2p anymore to do so.
Let's make a hypothetical example. Look at it Overwatch. It's a fun game, people love it. You a Brigitte main, can drop in and play casual, or you can go real, real hard into it and who knows what happens. Maybe you go pro, wind up in the Shanghai Dragons or some new team being featured in a cinderella story. But then Blizzard goes "We're adding a new item to the game! For the low-low price, of a thousand dollars; you can buy this shield that removes the cooldown timer on Brigitte's charge so you can just keep shield bashing people to death." You can't go competitive now; because if your competitive team does not have that shield, you just lose. That option of going competitive in the game has been stripped by your hands because you do not have that one gameplay influencing item that blizzard is selling.
Love the game. Enjoy the game. Stop getting in the way of the people though who'd like to not be reminded that we have lost the war against abhorrent microtransaction systems because of the people who enable these abhorrent microtransactions by either participating in them or downplaying them in favor of the "good," of the game so that more people are forced to suffer or also participate in them. You're not helping yourself. You're not helping your friends. You're not helping your community. You are only helping the publishers (not even the devs) who decided on nickel and diming you just because you want to try other systems in a game.
You can say "but these games may be making more overall" with that total revenue argument, but that begs the reiteration that the difference between the top earning games and the rest of F2P isn't the amount of average to low paying users, but an increase in high paying ones into the top 5%. You'd have to see a massive increase of users recorded in those lower ARPPU games for their total revenue to exceed the high ARPPU games, let alone match them. This hasn't been shown to be the case.
Also not sure what the LoL example is meant to show. That game has an ARPPU of ~$35 and an ARPU of ~$1.32. It's middling between the average and the top 5% for mobile, and we could even bring up Wild Rift or Legends of Runeterra as counterpoint which have both eclipsed LoL in total revenue. And both of those can be calculated with a higher ARPPU that directly relates to their in-app purchases recorded to the Play and App store.
LoL also still gets a large chunk of it's profits from whales, though they at least monetized themselves in a way that limits influence on the core game and doesn't drag any kind of progression into a decade long activity, it's mostly just people paying thousands for cosmetics. I have less ability to comment on Wild Rift or Legends of Runeterra about exactly how they are monetized.
This also relates to the point that the shift isn't stated to be generally happening outside the top spenders, which reduces the probability of many players feeding the revenue versus said whales.
Which also leads into the other post and your link about LoL. Statists mentions in its description the fact the revenue comes to in part from tournaments and sponsorships. Main reason I crossed out that prior statement in my post.
There is a large difference between what users are paying, and what Riot earns off LoL from corporate sponsorships and tournament deals. You can look at Overwatch (prior to Blizz' sponsorship crash) to find a similar situation for reported earnings. Was hoping I could find a good resource for that, but I've only found one article asserting Overwatch was ~$800 mil last year. As of this year Blizz' quarterly earnings are coming up short, even though Overwatch has seen more players recently thanks to Overwatch 2 testing and news. Big chunk of that loss in revenue is lost corporate sponsorships.
Relevant to the subject and similarly evoking the point of "details matter, because LoL shares that nature of a massive chunk of it's reported revenue, not being from players or it's ARPPU as a result. We would have to dive into the breakdown of the games revenue to know that division better.
I do certainly agree that high ARPPU is not inherently an indication of bad monetization or evil. There are certainly ways to monetize games that can actually be mechanically beneficial to a game. It's just considerably less common to see it done.
I created a Necromancer for my 1st (and only) character and was very unpleasantly surprised to find out the character starts with a retarded-looking scythe, and a shield that both look like very high end epic gear and my character also had two minions to fight for her right from the start.
Compared to the Necromancer from Diablo 2 that only started with a stupid knife and a Summon Skeleton ability that required you to kill something first really makes Diablo Immortal look bad and lazy.
It really feels like it was made for some mobile audience that never played Diablo 1 or 2 and don't care how true Immortal is to the previous games. It also feels like the game is a middle finger to all Diablo veterans.
I'm not mentioning Diablo 3, because it is not really a Diablo game, and Diablo 4 will also not be a Diablo game.
Indeed, making you point broader, cash shops and monetization are not a bad thing, it is just that we have seen them march slowly but relentlessly to exploitative over the years. Thats why a favour a sub, but it is not as if a cash shop intrinsically cannot be fair.
Too much complaining with no ideas. If people would not buy the P2W, and it shows them that, maybe that will stop it. Fat chance. Look at Star Citizen - 10 years, no official game and people throwing money at it.
But like Eoloe says some things in a cash shop are so weighted you have a hard time finding players who don't think that item is pay to win. I am not sure how you can use numbers and metrics to make a better decision? It is down to your personnel framework of what you think is fair, the playerbase arrives at its conclusions on the basis of where the weight of individual opinions and media articles settle, rightly or wrongly.
Funny how that works. Almost like selling these things piecemeal is a poor decision in the first place.
Just a bit of the extension that these companies do have to be called on these things and people do have to be aware of them, because they have less incentive to change if users simply are unaware and invest up to the point of butting up against buyer's remorse or otherwise.
Kinda delays the whole adapting bit as long as they can still draw people in long enough. Can argue that maybe that's because that game is "good enough" that people don't mind, but it's also that offset that we'd discussed before about how costs ramp up over time and allows things like buyer's remorse and sunk cost to become a thing, which makes the situation all the more muddled.
A lot of the conflict in this thread can be summarized in a very similar way, for example, to how Korrigan was arguing with others in the other thread.
Certainly you can say that Group B finds no relevance in the subject Group A is calling out, but that doesn't mean there's not an issue. The "noise" is functionally just two groups looking at two different parts of the user experience.
Additionally, if Group B only expects to enjoy a part of the game and fall off before running into the problems Group A is looking at, that also speaks to the subject of Group B not being the target audience of the game's design.
Which brings relevance back to the subject of Group A who are looking at the game as something they (or those they are looking at) are expecting to play for a longer duration where the concerns crop up.
I do feel sunk cost has a place there personally, because it nests itself directly into that ramping cost design. You got a $0.99 investment upfront, then a $5, then $10. Certainly some people like you may say "this is my fixed cost for the game", but there's also plenty who aren't even thinking that deeply about cost. It's simply the subject of convenience, which results in the later sunk cost.
Not always about factoring for personal approach, but what other common habits and trends may result in.
"What kind of games and focus in play has the Diablo franchise been known for?"
When a series has been lauded for years for it's loot systems, itemization, and progression mechanics, and for the last few years has relied very directly on maintaining recurring users not through expansion of narrative content, but of progression mechanic and seasonal gear rotation, then it makes for a rather obvious case to be made about who the expected audience of Immortal is.
And it's not the people who are going to casually play the campaign, do a few rifts, and fall off as they hit the paywall (or sooner). It's the people that are looking to it as a sequel to the previous titles as a progression-focused experience.
Which brings much of the relevance to the subject of how those mechanics are treated.
You can argue about misguided self-importance, but that also draws attention to the subject in the opposing direction. Dismissal of a subject because it's seen as being of little importance by another can make it seem like "lots of noise and little signal".
But is that actually the case, or is that just the imposed perception?
Take the BDO example. It's a generally well-received game, and certainly it has found success. But not by dismissing problems as "lots of noise and little signal". Instead, it was heeded, and they adapted.
Even many games we can look at in the mobile market tend to do little things to adapt. Gacha games frequently run events to toss out freebie kickback rewards in order to stem off loss of free and even paying players to the usual paid mechanics. Mobile ARPGs like Immortal will throw free item sets and pieces at users every so often to stave off the burn of the progression gating. There's an awareness there that the core mechanics are distasteful, and they have to turn around and apply some salve every so often.