Who would win:
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Centuries of Capitalist economic theory
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"Oh wait you can just mislead and manipulate people lol"
"and there you have it, under this theory capitalism will work perfectly as long as everyone is a rational actor"
"But people aren't rational actors, they make their decisions based on emotions"
"Oh wow that sounds way easier let's just take advantage of that"
The existence of marketing alone disproves the concept that a free market where everyone competes as equals can exist.
Information is a commodity, so misinformation is just another method for the rational marketplace to price in the value of useful knowledge.
Is the former not just a justification for the latter?
I meant in the sense that the usual justification is "in a free market the better product will win out, and that incentivizes innovation" but it turns out you don't actually have to make the product better you can just lie
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The algo supposedly matches up paying players with non paying players to force the non payers to consider paying.
I used to be really into video games and almost went into game coding as my degree. So glad i got bored with it all. Like yeah it's art. But like go touch some grass.
My brother payed video games so much in the dark that he now as tons of eye sensitive issues
I wish these MEGACORPS were run by people who actually like playnig games rather than people who like making money. I can't imagine any designer enjoying making these sorts of systems or developers wanting to build the infrastructure to facilitate those systems.
I wish these MEGACORPS were run by people who actually like playnig games rather than people who like making money.
I mean... that way gets you Sony's Star Wars Online. I remember one of my friends was on that Dev Team way back in the day, and he joked that they all spent more time playing WoW than coding the game they were actually working on.
Thing that disappoints me about this is its insanely easy to just download path of exile or pirate diablo 2 and get a better experience for no money.
Yeah, I can do that, but how am I supposed to experience a shittier Diablo 3 with microtransactions?
I don't often say this about AAA shit, but the D2 remaster is genuinely worth paying for. It's extremely slick, and the addition of native controller support makes it play better than Diablo 3 or immortal (which sucks ass).
D3 was such a disappointment out of the gate. Imagine spending ten years working on a sequel and this is the best you can do.
it's ok to do a grift as long as you maintain enough distance that you can assume that the victims are rich and deserve it but you conveniently never have investigate what the true source of the money you're making is.
this is different than when imperialists distance themselves from and refuse to learn about the violence done at the periphery because in this case I'm the one who is doing it.
G*mers will make 3 hour long video essays about microtransactions and there'll be like a week of outrage, but at the end of the day they all go :yes-honey-left: and pay up. Developers don't care about what they say, they care about what they do.
Kind of reductive to blame the :gamer-gulag:. The mechanisms these games use are designed to psychologically manipulate people into spending money.
a lot of bad shit like this happens especially in the MMO space, i think the suits know MMOs tend to attract people with addictive personalities and what are they gonna do? play the OTHER black hole game they poured 1000 hours in and in which they don't have any of the cool characters they built, shit they remember fondly, friend list, etc? yeah, not happening, they're going down with the ship
i would say they're so right wing because of this, everyone going "when my megabux gaming idea will be on top then I'll be the one raking in the gorillions"
If only that money could go to indie developers (or anything aside from Blizzard) instead.
Microtransactions aside, this game also sucks and was clearly thrown together last minute with recycled assets. This abomination is more of a resource hog on my beastly gaming desktop than Diablo 3, looks like total shit, and is literally unplayable with a controller. Yea lemme navigate menus with my right control stick acting as a shit-ass mouse, instead of, you know, snapping it to the buttons like even a one-dude indie team can figure out.
The entire leadership team of this project should be blacklisted from the industry for life.
obviously it was optimized for you to drunkedly slap a tiny screen with your sausage fingers
This is a lot of cash. According to Blizz in 2021 they grossed $5.1 billion in sales overall, and if Diablo Immortal can maintain this head of steam for an entire year, that will be about half a billion, bumping their revenues for 2022 by about 10%.
But i don't think Diablo Immortal will maintain this head of steam. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure will be when they shut the servers down - if it dies after two years then throw its corpse on the pile with the thousands of other mobile games to do so.
On the one hand, :yea:
On the other hand, I have to wonder how much of this shit is Enron-style accounting. There are so many other rogue-likes better than Diablo at this point, and none of them cost anything close to this. How much is straw purchases designed to inflate Activision stock price on the eve of a big merger?
super auto pets is fun and its purchases arent really predatory like so many mobile games are, no ads no matter what though
You can do the main story without spending a dime, just wouldn't recommend pvp because of the whales aoeing down entire groups.
It looks like hot trash. For mobile games, you're better off just getting an emulator and playing games from that. Playing GBA Fire Emblem games on the phone is pretty sweet if you're into SRPGs.
