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Honestly that's pretty cheap for a F2P game. The most financially successful F2P games will have planned for spend to 'go infinite'. This may be by setting up m
by somehnacct3757 4y ago
Honestly that's pretty cheap for a F2P game. The most financially successful F2P games will have planned for spend to 'go infinite'. This may be by setting up money fights on a ranked ladder, or constantly rotating out characters so that spenders have to reset progress.
The fact that you can max out in Diablo Immortal, and so cheaply, shows Blizzard still hasn't learned what F2P is all about. They are listening too much to their Gamer customers who are a microscopic piece of their TAM and unlikely to source many whales. Whales are incredibly wealthy people for whom $110k is weekend fun money. Gamers are a cohort that like to brag about fun hours per dollar. They're budget customers.
Blizzard thinks that you make console & PC games on mobile and you make mobile money. A lot of game companies from the before-mobile-times think this is a formula. And their customers egg them on. But if you build the mobile game those customers want, you will lose money at worst and leave money on the table at best. Talking 90% of the money still on the table.
Blizzard's biggest problem is perhaps that their IP appeals only to Gamers, who as a culture resist F2P business models (budget customers.) This article is one such example, meant to stoke outrage within that group. The people who are going to spend $110k on Diablo Immortal don't read Gamer media, or even consider themselves Gamers. They've never been on Twitch and they don't have Steam accounts. Gamers think they are the center of the gaming universe but mobile gaming audiences have turned them into a niche audience in less than a decade.
I think Blizzard should give up at this point and keep making games mech-aesthetically tailored for the budget Gamer audience. Blizzard and Gamers alike think WoW was a huge gaming phenomenon but on the mobile scale it registers somewhere around Subway Surfers. Blizzard IP does not splash with mobile audiences. When a Gamer brand enters the mobile market it's akin to releasing a video game movie in theaters. Diablo Immortal is a lot closer to Mario Bros Movie than Sonic Movie in that analogy.
- friendlypeg 4y agoThey also have very tame monetization in their upcoming Warcraft mobile game when compared to the game it's cloning - Clash Royale. There are no loot boxes and you can buy character outright. Still the announcement was met with mixed reactions. Maybe Blizzard's reputation has been so tarnished that even that is not enough and they need to forgo any mechanism that can be remotely considered giving paying customer advantages. The thing is Activision has already successfully brought its flagship title Call of Duty to the mobile with only cosmetic store and making banks with it. So I disagree with you that Blizzard will be leaving money on the table by following that route. It would be interested to see how well Diablo Immortal is going to do considering how much bad press it gets. Like you said the mobile gaming population is so much bigger than the PC one, but I question if the former are really immune to the opinions from YouTuber, social media and word of mouth from their friends.
- Ruthalas 4y agoThis comment makes me sad. Primarily because you are correct. I think a nice addition at the bottom would be the addendum, "if the goal is maximise profit at all costs and there is no regard for their customer-base beyond how effectively they can be exploited."