Support NeoGAF

[cormack12]

Source: https://www.gamepressure.com/newsro...oney-players-spent-on-microtransaction/z1726b

Diablo 4 sales have brought Blizzard more than $1 billion. About 15 percent of that amount came from microtransactions.

 

[NickFire]

I had a lot of fun with it over the first year. I would have bought some of the custom skins (beyond battle pass) if they weren't so expensive. Considering MtX was only 15%, I think they left money on the table due to greed. If those prices were slashed I bet 15% would have been much higher.

 

[Damigos]

After the campaign i couldnt keep playing.

 

[Draugoth]

1/5 of the players are whales, why im not surprised

 

[Saber]

Diablo winning money out of mtx and dirty tatics, something so low I would never expect from the franchise.
Good thing I'm not even closer to the series anymore. Still a shame though.

 

[Ceadeus]

Mtx is the reason why I'm not playing D4. With this and season pass you hide your char behind cosmetics and there's no way to tell a random, hey bro is that a real shako? WUG, WUW for it?

 

[SlimySnake]

It's insane that they can have a game that makes a billion a year but still lay off thousands of developers.

 

[Bashtee]

I had a lot of fun with it over the first year. I would have bought some of the custom skins (beyond battle pass) if they weren't so expensive. Considering MtX was only 15%, I think they left money on the table due to greed. If those prices were slashed I bet 15% would have been much higher.

I agree 100% with you. The seasons were a mixed bag, but the overall gameplay was solid. I tried Path of Exile and Last Epoch. Nice change of pace, but I didn't click with PoE and D4 just keeps pulling me back in. And yeah, also true about the cosmetics. Too expensive. Most of the time you don't even see yourself due to the effects.

 

[Guilty_AI]

so roughly 10M sales?

 

[EverythingsOverrated]

With how much the battlepass and MTX bullshit is tied into the game I expected more than 15% to be honest.

After the campaign i couldnt keep playing.

Same. Tried with 2 characters. First one played through the campaign, had fun, started the post game stuff, bounced off after level 54. This season started, created a new character, skipped campaign, stopped playing after level 51. I kept telling myself the post campaign stuff was about to get really fun, but it continued to be meh.

 

[Skifi28]

Barely managed to finish the campaign, it was such a slog. I might give 2.0 a try though.

 

[IntentionalPun]

1/5 of the players are whales, why im not surprised

Huh? Where are you getting that from?

 

[Kuranghi]

What a massive disappointment this was, waited fucking 12 years it just didn't hook me at all and I really dislike the whole constantly connected game thing with the shadows of other players and world boss crap.

Minor things to some but major to me like the totally fucked HDR and almost fucked up SDR really irked me, they made such a big deal about going back to the really dark and grim tone and I was like oh wow will look amazing on my lovely telly and what am I greeted with? Raised black level HDR (not minor issue, the contrast is fucked like The Callisto Protocol was and still is).

Usually in games with broken HDR the SDR is fine/okay, but nah its just an issue with the gamma of the game generally and in SDR you can tweak the sliders but achieving a proper black level means turning down the slider so far that the rest of the image becomes broken, eg shadows are crushed and highlights are flat. Garbage 🗑

Games can have a brightness slider to increase the overall brightness of the image, a brightness/black level slider and a contrast/white level slider to make it playable on subpar displays that darken the image too much to preserve their black level, boost black levels to regain shadow detail on IPS/ADS panels and to reduce highlight detail to give back some juice to fix the first issue, but there is never a time when you should have to adjust sliders id you have a calibrated display, that's part of the point of calibrating a display ffs.

Just like with Hitman 3 they insist it's how it's meant to look and they won't change it, the reality is that there no one from the relevant department who could fix it still working on the game. A game can simultaneously have a filmic/milky appearance and still have good black levels, this is evident by all the H1 and H2 levels on H3 not having the issue lol, it's so fucking frustrating.

 

[Edgelord79]

Everyone seems to hate it, yet they made a billion. Somethings isn’t adding up.

 

[adamsapple]

Damn, that's way higher than I expected.

 

[SJRB]

 

[simpatico]

Campaign was a blast. Had no intention of grinding or anything after that, and I got my money's worth. Don't ignore this one SP gamers. There's a lot of meat on these bones.

 

[Killer8]

Men in Boxes redemption arc.

Dozens must fail so one can succeed.

 

[BennyBlanco]

I made a seasonal character this week after not touching the game since going through the campaign at launch, and I actually like the seasonal content. Might even buy the DLC. I have also not felt compelled to spend a penny because i do not care about the cosmetics. In fact I looked at the shop and the armor for sale is practically indistinguishable from the armor you get playing the game.

 

[Shadowstar39]

How? This game was boring as hell compared to past diablo games. I lost intrest as everything seemed the same. Nothing felt unique. I had more fun with Diablo 3 (the final form of it at least), and that is saying something.

 

[Ronin_7]

It's insane that they can have a game that makes a billion a year but still lay off thousands of developers.

Welcome to the games industry.

How can anyone over 30 even considered working in such a shitty place when you have a family to take care? I mean your game can do amazing but you will still be layoff.

Makes sense.

 

[IntentionalPun]

Everyone seems to hate it, yet they made a billion. Somethings isn’t adding up.

Lots of unhappy buyers means there were lots of sales.

People upset are always the loudest. I just can’t get into the always online “random person is already clearing out an area when I go there” thing, but have tons of friends who love the game.

 

[Mortisfacio]

Waiting to see if they release sales figures for the expansion, will truly show how well the game is doing going into the future if it sells at least a few million. The launch was pretty terrible, but they've done a ton to improve the game. The general community consensus based on reddit, the discord and the official forums is the people actually still dabbling in playing the game enjoy it now.

 

[ThisIsMyDog]

Diablo is series with the most boring gameplay in history

 

[Ogbert]

Barely managed to finish the campaign, it was such a slog. I might give 2.0 a try though.

Likewise.

All that effort to make something so deeply, deeply boring.

 

[Schmendrick]

I think it was fine as a one and done game. It utterly failed to keep me interested beyond that, though. So as a GAAS ....nah.

 

[Mister Wolf]

Well deserved.

 

[rm082e]

I gave them $70, I played through the game as a Rogue, and I enjoyed the number grinding for about 60 hours. Then I got bored. I tried the other classes and wow did they all suck ass. Thank god I played Rogue for my first playthrough. The seasonal content was a pathetic joke. Uninstalled after 3 months and have no reason to ever go back. It was "fine", but D3 was a much more enjoyable game in it's day.

I will check out Path of Exile 2 over Christmas break. Hopefully it will scratch the itch more than D4 did.

Edit: I would like to know if that 15% number includes the season passes, or just individual items? I'm assuming it includes seasonal passes, which seems overall pretty low for a live service game. That's not surprising though, given the seasonal content looked terrible.

 

[tmlDan]

pretty shallow game but it wasnt terrible, havent touched it since launch

good for them i guess

 

[RoboFu]

I install it again the other day and it was a lot better than when I left it.. still needs some more variety to the areas.

I haven't bought any mix though lol

 

[Jigsaah]

Wait a minute. Isn't this on gamepass? What did they do in terms of microtransactions?

 

[Vyse]

It's insane that they can have a game that makes a billion a year but still lay off thousands of developers.

Guess how I look at it is every Studio is a cost center. Just because one makes a positive ROI, doesn’t necessarily mean they should subsidize others that fail to make a profit. Make a string of games, or one big flop, that don’t sell well and its future is in danger. It’s really hoping that they make the right pick and putting years and millions into development, anticipating what will resonate many years in the future. Sounds like a very hard business model that keeps getting more expensive.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Game is ,ok,
I think D3 was better

 

[Timberwolf25]

Had a lot of fun, although the chase for the uniques is brutal as a solo player.
Sorcerer main for life

 

[Kacho]

Haven’t touch it since launch. Happy Blizzard got the cash cow they wanted… I guess?

 

[pulicat]

Around 20m units which is really great.

 

[Hanna7]

OMG, D4 is ok, but the best for me is D3

 

[A.Romero]

It says it made $666 million just by preorders so it's not hard to believe.

I'm not a big fan of Diablo but I tried it thanks to Gamepass. It hooked me but I couldn't keep with the timed seasons so I didn't continue.

Still think it's a great game (didn't spend any money on MTX nor I felt I needed to to enjoy the game).

 

[finalflame]

 

[Edgelord79]

Lots of unhappy buyers means there were lots of sales.

People upset are always the loudest. I just can’t get into the always online “random person is already clearing out an area when I go there” thing, but have tons of friends who love the game.

I hear you but I think there are a lot of happy casual players in the game. I enjoy it in spurts. I leave and come back and don’t take it too seriously. Waiting for Titan Quest 2 and PoE2.

 

[Jesb]

I tried it for a few hours and it was boring to me.

 

[EDMIX]

Ok, but it was suppose to do 4 billion, so...it flopped, plus didn't fortnite do more? so...like, that means this is flop /s


Some people about to be triggered by this and proceed to goal post lol This is great for this game, I didn't do as many runs as I normally do with the past Diablo titles, but might do a new character build in the future.

 

[Sooner]

I keep trying, but I don't really get the appeal of Diablo.

 

[Timberwolf25]

I keep trying, but I don't really get the appeal of Diablo.

End game min/max builds. Everything else can be done relatively easy

 

[Sooner]

End game min/max builds. Everything else can be done relatively easy

 

[DavidGzz]

It's gigantic. D3 sold what 40mil? No surprise. Been top 10 as a Steam Deck game for ages. Doing great numbers on Steam and it isn't even it's main platform. And it's going to skyrocket again this October. Can't wait for the Monk reborn.

 

[semiconscious]

It's insane that they can have a game that makes a billion a year but still lay off thousands of expenditures.

ftfy...

it helps if you just think of this new 'economic model' as a kinder, gentler form of skynet. it doesn't physically kill you...

 

[MiguelItUp]

After the campaign i couldnt keep playing.

This is where I was at around launch. I'm sure it's improved, but I don't see myself going back to it anytime soon. With all the hate I've seen I'm kinda shocked it's made that much.

 

[Bry0]

I have come back every season since season 2 and get the battle pass. I pretty always stop after I complete the seasonal journey but there have been a few seasons where a go for Uber uniques / mythics now that there are somewhat reliable ways to get them. It’s pretty fun. Never could get too into POE, only made it to end game on one character but the actual game feel kinda sucks, even grim dawn feels a lot better to me. POE 2 looks amazing though. I could see myself playing both poe2 and d4.

I’ve tried all the other arpgs but as of now grim dawn and d4 are the ones I come back to most often.

 

[jakinov]

It's insane that they can have a game that makes a billion a year but still lay off thousands of developers.

Which thousand of developers got laid off? Todays laid off when I read the articles this morning only mentioned non devs being laid off previous layoffs were all across the different parts of the company.

The game doesn’t make a billion a year it made a billion in its lifetime in revenue which at this point happens to be a year. It’s probably not going to make nearly as much its second year. Game development costs are front-loaded you spend in this case 6 years making a game then you make a bunch of money suddenly then it revenue significantly drops for another N years while you work on their next game. This is one of the reasons why companies love the GaaS you can actually expect the money that helps keeps the lights on coming in regularly instead of every half decade. In other words they made 1 billion dollars over 7 years. But on a side note they also didn't actually make 1 billion for the first obvious reason that it's revenue not profit but the number that usually reported is "sell-through revenue" which is basically how much money was spent on buying the game and MTX not how much money actually ends up in the bank account of the studio. Something like 2/3 of that would be the actual net revenue for the studio then you have to subtract the dev/marketing costs for the profits.

To answer further the fact that you have a part of your business with extra money doesn’t change that you don’t need as many people in another part like for example customer support. If you let parts of your company success compensate for other parts of the companies failure or inefficiency it eats up resources and prevents you from doing other things leading to a lack of productivity for the same amount of money spent overall. Layoffs are used to not just eliminate redundancies but they get used to get rid of low performers. With both redundancies and inefficacies removed that frees up resources for other teams to hire, the same team to hire better people and for them to do new things like create brand new teams in key locations. A simplified example is if you ran a chain of restaurants and one was failing because you over-hired (too much staff for the amount of people that actual eat at the restaurant) or for external factors like maybe the economy in that area turn to shit or it was a bad idea to open a sushi restaurant in a certain neighborhood altogether, whatever reason. You don't go "well the other stores make enough profit to outweigh the loses of this place" lets keep this failing business going. You especially don't do that if you don't own the restaurant chain and were simply hired to manage them and grow profitability by growing the chain; you would get fired or even sued.