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Comment by T-hawk | Hacker News Reader

Diablo 3 was something of a different story. Blizzard knew players would create their own functionally-IAP black market anyway, because it happened in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. So Blizzard figured they may as well bring auctions in house to make the market honest and usable for players without worrying about scammers. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

What wrecked Diablo 3 was the enormous power discrepancy between what a player could reasonably find on their own and what was readily available on the auction market. The game had to be balanced around the latter to avoid auction buyers god-moding over everything, which left solo players completely screwed. With a tighter power balance between common and rare items, Diablo 3 would have continued to be playable just fine.

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>There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Yes there is. Diablo 3 would have been much better if buying gear was the exception to the rule. By legitimizing it and as you mentioned, failing to provide balance, Blizzard unintentionally made the purchase of gear the only viable method of progression for most players.

With World of Warcraft, Blizzard made tons of money off of cosmetic items. If they wanted to increase revenue, they should have gone this route instead of ruining the best action-rpg franchise in the world.

Yeah to those who see it as some catch-22 that was forged at the dawn of man, sure might as well "legitimize" IAP...

For others, like myself & Phaus, apparently, we'll just play a different damn game. I think the disconnect here is that people are like "well look its still working, isnt it?" but the idea of "ruining" a game isnt that the thing is broken now, its that casual players dont wanna get involved cuz its an all-or-nothing shitshow where youre not sure exactly when the menu is gonna pop up saying "give us more money or your time invested is now a complete waste".

i only play single-player story titles now for the most part because i know that pretty much anything else is gonna try to mess with my mind & prey on the consumer. COD & Battlefield are the best examples i can think of. They keep game prices high, get players addicted to repetitive mindless multiplayer, then charge $15 for a change of scenery (should 3 or 4 maps cost 1/4 the price of the game itself?)

If you buy, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're being ripped off & it makes you resent the gamemakers. If you don't buy, you're left with a limited set of maps that is getting duller by the second, lol

I'm avoiding by just buying downloadable PC games for between $1 - $10 each & then when its over its over. its the skinner box games that overprice DLC and this alone should be a trigger that makes people see them for what they are & have the willpower to opt out

Its especially sad i think because old-school PC gamers probly remember when COD2 & the like were very DIY, moddable titles for nerdy WW2 enthuiasts.

Now they are a massive corporation with nothing moddable & the balls to sell simple gun skins in like $15 packs :D

This is pretty much spot-on. I can't stand CoD anymore for quite a few reasons, but one of the biggest is that they charge money for map packs that are often based on old content. If I'm loyal enough to give you 60 bucks every time you come out with a new game, don't try screwing me out of extra money for maps that I already bought a year ago. Port them for free like good developers always have, or just don't do it at all.

I think valve has done the best job out of anyone when it comes to monetization in Counterstrike:GO. You can purchase custom maps and skins to use on official matchmaking servers, or you get all of the same content for free plus a wide variety of mods and use them on custom servers. They get paid, and the customers still have freedom of choice.

thats cool, i didnt know GO does that (bought it during xmas sale, haven't even played yet).

its nice to be back in the PC world. my friend gave me an xbox360 & i was playing that for a bit but now instead of a console i have geforce 770... hadn't even realized the notion of "custom servers" still existed, hah :D

I think D3's AH failing was using real money, not just balancing or buying gear by default.

Buying gear in WoW is easy and a given up to a point, but limited to in-game currency. To buy some of the best gear, you just have to be the owner of enough gold to buy something from one of the two auction houses if it shows up. That meant you were active in your server's economy (helpful) or you were buying gold from scammers (which a lot of people are scared to do) - or you were raiding at a point where that gear was equivalent to what you can get, so you just ignored it (a small minority of raiders, not just WoW players overall). If real money was involved, it'd probably turn into something worse than D3's AH fiasco where people would quit playing since everyone playing for non-RP/solo reasons would eventually be forced to spend a bunch of money on top of in-game time to be on an even footing.

Not that I think D3 should have followed the same exact footsteps as WoW in terms of how to make money, but I'm looking forward to next month to maybe get around to start playing D3 again now that the AH will be gone there.

Most gear in WoW cannot be traded. If you want to buy the best gear, you wait for a guild to farm the content, then buy the gear from the guild by doing the instance with them. People do trade real money for this service, but it is understandably quite expensive.

Current-tier raid and PVP gear can show up on the Black Market Auction House, sold by NPCs. The BMAH sells a very small number of pieces during the few months it takes people to clear content. When I played in a top 20 US 25 man guild in T14-15, our BMAH was usually camped by the other faction, so we couldn't buy stuff anyway. It didn't make any noticeable difference.

The cosmetic business model has seemed to work well for Valve. Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and Dota 2 use this model, from which Dota gathered worth of $600'000 only from donations towards the game's yearly championship. The players received some in-game items from the donation, which gave them cosmetic items for playable characters and new UI skins. I personally like the idea, as the highly competetive games stay balanced as the cosmetic items do not give any edge to their owner.

Valve also gives the cosmetic items as random drops after matches or from spectating competetive games. The players are then able to sell these items to other players trough Valve's market. From the trades Valve takes a procentual fee (or margin, that is), which can raise quite high as some knives in CS cost over $300 and some couriers in Dota have been sold as high as $9000 a pop.

Even though the cosmetic business model sounds like a golden road, I've yet to across any mobile game which would have used it.

Valve also had a virtual monopoly on digital game sales, billions of dollars of alternate revenue and huge teams of engineers and artists to build that Steam market and make the initial bunch of items.

Valve is incredibly unique yet people keep telling tiny companies making mobile games that they should be like Valve.

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