The year is 2017. Electronic Arts, the standout of the horrible video game publishers, has just released the highly anticipated Star Wars Battlefront II, and people were angry. Specifically, fans of the Battlefront series were horrified by the microtransactions present in the latest game (for the uninitiated, microtransactions are an element of a game that allows players to pay real money in exchange for further progress in the game) . Microtransactions encourage the worst behaviors in video games, to the point that “using the mother’s visa” became a joke about how the worst players would spend more than the best until they got an advantage. It’s also a much-hated option for the video game community, and EA was forced to reverse its microtransaction program, teaching everyone a valuable lesson about what players will endure or should be expected to endure.
Or so I thought. Here we are, five years later, and another publisher has just released a new installment of a beloved series that has caused a great deal of outrage over the predatory method of monetization at stake. On Thursday, Activision Blizzard – if EA is the most hated publisher, Activision Blizzard is not far behind – launched Diablo Immortal, a mobile version of its long-running, addictive action role-playing game (ARPG) series.
The game had been ridiculed by its advertiser for being a mobile game, so much so that at the end of the development process, Blizzard announced a port on the computer, allowing people who simply do not want to play a mobile game. action on your phone can enter. about “fun.” I’ve put quotes around “fun” because it’s become pretty clear, pretty quickly, that the game has been launched with a horrifying commitment to microtransactions.
With real money, players can buy huge amounts of player power, surpassing those casual brutes who just want to play a game without spending thousands of dollars for fun. This is no exaggeration, and comes to the heart of Diablo Immortal: since the announcement of the game’s microtransaction system, fans of the series began to do the math around its many systems, and the general consensus is that players who really want to maximize their characters could end up spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Sure, this is an extreme example, but the problem with Diablo Immortal is that spending money isn’t really optional if you want to experience everything the game has to offer, especially the final game content that has kept Diablo 3 alive for more than a while. . decade after his own rocky, money-plagued launch. To make higher level raids and player-to-player combat, players must increase their character’s equipment to obscene levels, and these achievements cannot be achieved through casual engagement. Like most mobile games, Diablo Immortal encourages improvements in time to get people to play every day for a long time or spend money.
Of course, Blizzard has to make money with Diablo Immortal, and a game that cost millions of dollars to develop should cost something to play. But this is the basis of the trick they want to get out of these seemingly free games. Instead of charging $ 10 to download and play a relatively slim game, they hook people up by making it free, and then expect enough players to end up spending money on microtransactions to block the game’s revenue.
Diablo Immortal microtransactions restrict more progress and content than I’ve seen in similar canopy games. I will eventually find myself with a progression wall, at which point I will have to spend a lot of money to continue to level up my character to access the more exciting parts of the game. If I try to fight other players in the game’s PvP combat, I’ll fall for someone who has spent a lot more money than I ever thought possible. This is not really the fault of this player, in theory: if they have the income available and they really like the game, then why not spend money to enjoy it even more?
In practice, however, such systems are predatory. Developers rely on “whales” or people who spend enough money to fund all the players who don’t spend a single dollar, and these people are usually extreme fans of whatever game is at stake. It’s not that different from how the gambling industry works, so much so that Diablo Immortal isn’t launched in Belgium and the Netherlands, because those countries have banned “loot boxes” or the use of real money for items. like this. Blizzard has blamed the non – launch in these countries on the “current operating environment”.
The use of microtransactions by Diablo Immortal even beyond the exploitation markers already set by other developers is the fact that Blizzard is very good at what they do, which is to create perfectly tuned role-playing games to activate addictive impulses. of the players. Players of a certain generation can talk at length about the hours and hours they spent looking for loot in Diablo II, and the hooks of Diablo Immortal are just as sharp. Combat is an interesting version of the Diablo series, and it’s fun to play on both my computer and my phone. The graphics, especially on a phone, are some of the best I’ve ever seen for a game like this, and it has a fully realized world and story that interests me to see what happens next. I’ll probably finish the main story and get to level 60 at some point, but the feeling of wanting to keep playing to experience all that Diablo Immortal has to offer has been tempered in advance by the monetary requirements to get there.
What could have been a great experience while the long wait for Diablo 4 continues has become the worst example to date of the madness of the video game industry for the player portfolio, not to mention the humans who have the credit cards.