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Nearly 90% Of Developers Surveyed Say Premium Games Don't Need Microtransactions
(insider-gaming.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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As long as whales keep buying stuff they'll keep putting microtransactions in games. Start making fun of people that buy skins and horse armor and maybe people will stop buying shit that has no value.
The Team Fortress / CS:GO model of microtransactions was the least offensive and honestly not much different than the pastiche upgrades you could get before DLC, via "Special Edition" game releases and other gimmicks.
Even then, what's obnoxious about modern gaming is the endless injection of ads. Compare Diablo 4 and Baldur's Gate 3, and one of the first things that jump out at you is how much more BG3 is a game and D4 is just a grind that demands more and more of your money. Meanwhile, with the exception of an artbook and soundtrack, what you see with BG3 is what you get. They even tacked on incremental improvements after release that weren't bundled as nickle-and-dime add-ons.
And look who made more money? It was a tie!
I don't think you can strictly shame Microsoft/Blizzard/Activison at this point, because the current C-level staff can get caught in the middle of a serial sexual harassment scandal and still just shrug it off. I don't think you can influence them with your wallet, either, because their model appears to work well-enough (even Diablo Immortal brought in half a billion dollars, and that game sucked shit) relative to BG3 which brought in slightly over $650M.
I think, at some point, you just have to ignore these games at a personal level and satisfy yourself with the knowledge that a dozen or so high quality games get released every year, even if they're swimming in a sea of hundreds of crappy freemium over-promoted titles. Don't worry about the Whales. Just focus on what's good.
Was it? There's a very recent infographic from Larian, and if you cross reference one or two of those stats against achievement data, it looks like they maybe sold about 10M copies. That's lower than I was expecting, but that's what my math says. Not only did Diablo IV sell more copies at the same price, but there were also more opportunities for them to sell post-launch stuff in Diablo.
Estimates put it around 13 million sales on Steam alone. Say another 5 million from console sales combined to a guesstimate around 18 million.