LogFAQs > #970733519

HornedLion posted...

But I think they learned from D3 and Mobile.

They "learned" what they can and can't get away with, which generally won't actually have been a surprise because they research this stuff pretty exhaustively before trying it out. D3's RMAH wasn't removed because they realized it was a mistake, it was removed because they felt they'd made all the money they could from it and stood to make more by making the game work better. Immortal's monetization isn't because they didn't realize there would be a backlash to needing to spend six figures to finish a character, it's because they (correctly) predicted that the handful of people willing to spend six figures on their character (or lacking the impulse control not to, because who doesn't like exploiting mental illness for fun and profit?) would generate more revenue than more reasonable monetization strategies.

The thing a lot of people don't seem to understand in these discussions is that the D3's RMAH wasn't an accident. Immortal wasn't an accident. In both cases, they served exactly the purposes that the higher-ups making the decisions wanted from them, which is to make far more money than simply letting the dev team create a good game would have. Acitblizz won't have learned from those mistakes because they weren't mistakes. They were representations of exactly what they wanted for each game, and there's every reason to believe that they want it for D4 as well.

Will D4 be outright pay-to-win? Probably not. They know that they would sacrifice a lot of sales by doing that to a main series game, especially after committing to not doing so (which, again, is blatantly a matter of making Immortal terrible, then saying "we won't be that bad" to win PR points even though they're still doing far worse than would have been acceptable a decade ago). Will they be monetizing every aspect that they think they can get away with without being called P2W and doing everything in their power to manipulate players into buying the stuff they insist is "optional"? Absolutely, and I fully expect that the early stages of the game will be specifically designed to lull people into thinking it won't be that bad.