[ SECRET POST #4331 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4331 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Sabrina the Teenage Witch reboot]


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03.
[The Great British Bake Off, series 9]


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04.
[K/DA - POP/STARS - League of Legends]


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05.
[Pointless (Australia)]


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06.
[Penny Dreadful]


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07.
[Diablo Mobile/Blizzard]










Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 29 secrets from Secret Submission Post #620.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

07. https://i.imgur.com/gTQYtVf.jpg
[Diablo Mobile/Blizzard]

[(Anonymous)]

What?

[(Anonymous)]

Blizzard decided to make a side project mobile Diablo game. Gamers, being entitled babies, threw a tantrum about it for about a week.

[(Anonymous)]

I really don't think the "tantrum" was all about a gaming company making money.

[(Anonymous)]

what was it about

[(Anonymous)]

"Waaahhh, Blizz made a mobile game and we are PC gamers."

[(Anonymous)]

For actual context: some gamers are angry because Blizzard made a mobile-only Diablo game the feature Diablo event at Blizzcon, a convention for PC gamers, in a really tone-deaf way.

The mobile Diablo game is made in partnership with NetEase, a Chinese mobile gaming company known for its microtransaction-heavy, p2w games. It also seems like a Diablo reskin of their existing games.

Personally, I don't care about the mobile spinoff. I don't hate that it exists. No plans to play it, but if people want to play and enjoy it more power to them. Blizzard making it the headline Diablo event at Blizzcon was a complete PR disaster though. That's why people are angry.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you think that the degree of their anger was proportionate to the thing that happened?

[(Anonymous)]

man this is an uninspired troll

you should have stuck to the claim about how it's misogynist to be mad about it because the casual gaming market is predominantly female and this totally !gatekeeping!

[(Anonymous)]

It is possible to be critical of more than one thing at the same time, yaknow

You can have problems with Blizarred and also identify the response of gamers as being incredibly toxic

[(Anonymous)]

I still don't get why it turned into the shitfest it did in the first place. Blizzard effectively warned Diablo fans in advance not to get their hopes up for major news. Why they did it anyway and then cried when they were disappointed is beyond me.

[(Anonymous)]

Gamers

[(Anonymous)]

because three months before warning people not to get their hopes up for major news, they made a video telling people to get their hopes up for major news

it's very difficult to derail a hype train when blizzard themselves are the ones who started it

[(Anonymous)]

the shitfest was more about how the mobile game was announced, not the fact that it was

blizzcon is, let's face it, an event for blizzard's hardcore fans to go and be hardcore with each other and with blizz (nobody's going to candycrushcon); so for them to invite all those hardcore fans to the event (at some cost to the attendees - blizzcon tickets ain't cheap, never mind travel costs) and then say "yeah, we have nothing to announce that you guys will be interested in BUT HERE'S A MOBILE GAME" is not only the disappointment of not having a major announcement, but an apparent rubbing of the face in the fact that they're pursuing a different audience - hence why "do you guys not have phones" was such a poor joke to tell at that moment

[(Anonymous)]

So what you're telling me is that they're mad over a badly-timed advertising rollout.

That doesn't really make me more sympathetic to them, I gotta say

[(Anonymous)]

While some of the reactions displayed your usual gamer toxicity, I don't think that a multi billion dollars company known for its predatory business practices should be sympathized with and made into poor little victims.

Backslash against dumb PR moves and the perceived bastardization of beloved series shouldn't be put into the same basket as your average 'guys throwing a hissy fit because oh no how dare this game have female characters', imo. Game companies aren't a protected class. Customers are allowed to have expectations for the products they are buying. Criticize the way they are showing it, sure, but the base issue isn't invalid by default.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with this, in general.

Did people overreact? Yep. Are those people idiots? Yep.

Does that mean all their points are invalid and Activision Blizzard is the good guy? Nope. Especially not seeing their history of trying to monetize everything - with attempts like Diablo III's real money auction house going down in flames - and especially not considering who they've chosen to partner with to create this. And choosing the more and more monetized/predatory mobile space to do it in.

I don't think raging like a manbaby is how to deal with this, but neither is embracing the idea with naive optimism that it's just about "making money" and how that couldn't be a bad thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone involved is a bad guy, and calling it a "minor overreaction" is a bit of an understatement when it's really the same kind of toxic entitlement that is chronically displayed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

[(Anonymous)]

The cognitive dissonance between "Give us more Diablo and Starcraft!" and "But not on the platforms with the highest revenue of last year!" could power a small city.

[(Anonymous)]

People have every right to get pissed about a mobile game which will be filled with microtransactions.

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone has the right to be whiny and ridiculous if they want to be, but unless the game was forcibly downloaded to their phones or something they don't have the right to not be mocked for being stereotypical gamer babies.

[(Anonymous)]

just don't play it

[(Anonymous)]

why do people give so much of a shit about microtransactions? i literally don't get it. unless there are certain things that are only available by paying, who cares if some people want to dump their money into a mobile game? i play lots of mobile games without spending a cent 90% of the time and i've never felt inhibited or like i was missing out on things because i don't feel like paying for stuff.

if you want to pay, awesome, go ahead and do it. if not, don't. it's not that hard.

[(Anonymous)]

Microtransactions are legitimately bad in a few instances:

1) Where they involve an element of gambling. This is dangerous and exploitative of people with gambling problems, which is also often the reason people include them in the first place - they're a really good way to get some people to spend absurd amounts of money on your game.

2) Where they exist in games that you pay for up front, where they're just really bad for consumers and screw you out of something you paid for

Outside of that, there's really no problem with them, but I think it's a legit complaint in those two instances.

[soldatsasha]

To add to what the anon above me said, even legit non-gambling micro-transactions aren't great. They're designed to take advantage of consumer psychology and basically entice people spend way more than they would on a regular transaction.

In essence they create a shopping addiction.

The player spends $1.50 on a power-up, and it gets them through a tough level. It's easy for the player to justify the purchase as just a little bit of cash for a less stressful game experience. Then maybe they buy the power-up ten pack for $10. They feel like it's money well spent bc the first power-up was fine and they play the game a lot, but the side effect is that now they feel subconsciously invested in the game. So even if their attention wanes, they'll keep playing bc they've spend real money. At this point, it's an easy jump to buying some cosmetic items. Those cosmetic items give them a few minutes of novelty for just a little cash, so it's easy to keep buying more and more. The cost is so low that most players won't really tally it up and think about how much they've spent.

After a few months, that adds up to a lot more than they would have spent otherwise. To give a more concrete example, I'll compare Mass Effect to Subeta (a pet-site with tons of cash shop items).

For Mass Effect, there were weapons and armor DLC packs for about $5. Totally optional, mostly cosmetic, but they did give a little boost. Note that this is a single-player game so there's no competitive advantage to buying DLC. There were also story DLC for $15-$20. These added several hours of quests, unique environments, cool stories, new squadmates for the whole game, etc. but many customers balk at the thought of paying that much. To buy ALL of the story DLC for the trilogy, you'd have to spend about $120 iirc.

Subeta has a monthly cash collection which has your choice of a variety of items. Each item is $2.50. Some are purely cosmetic, others have various "uses" such as going into collections. To complete these collections, it's necessary to buy tons of cash items either with your own money or the site currency. On top of these monthly collections, every month lots of other cash shop items are released. There's also lots of special monthly promotions for buying cash currency, discounts for buying it in large amounts, various cash shop sales, user-made custom items, etc. Many users have spent multiple hundreds or (literally) thousands of dollars on the site. It's easy for them to justify it, bc they're only spending it in increments of a few dollars. At most they might spend $10 on an exclusive item or something. But it adds up.

tl;dr Micro-transactions are the High Fructose Corn Syrup of gaming.