Shit like this is why people go back and play much older titles and have a great time with them.
c/patientgamers rise up! Or maybe not. We’ll just wait until it goes on sale and maybe give it a try down the road.
“People” as in maybe 5% of players. Most of the money is in what is being released - live services, forever games. They’re not idiots, they have statistics and know what most players actually pay for.
The entirety of sales for Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, generated less money than a single mount skin in World of Warcraft.
47% of the total playing time on Steam was spent on games released in the last one to seven years, while a sizeable 37% of time was spent in games that have been out for eight years or more.
Also with all the recent Concord-style live service fails maybe investors will want to fund other stuff from now on? idk
Playtime has nothing to do with this. If I pull 800hrs in Garry’s Mod and then 10 people buy Fifa and put in 2hrs each, most of the playtime is mine in an old game. Yet I paid like $10 for it and they spent $600. It also isn’t surprising that older games have more playtime - more time for someone who is “hooked” to play something. There is only 24hrs in a day after all. Also this doesn’t count live service games seperately and games outside of steam - League of Legends comes to mind. Same for Warframe. Huge behemoths that people play for hundreds of hours and spend hundreds of dollars on.
Shit like this is why people go back and play much older titles and have a great time with them
“People” as in maybe 5% of players
That’s the part of the comment I was referring to. It’s factually wrong: only ~15% of playtime is spent on 2024 games
LoL didn’t release in 2024, neither did Warframe. I’m not arguing that old service games don’t make the most revenue, they obviously do, I’m arguing that a lot of the live service games that are actively comming out are almost all underperforming and failing to get any kind of audience. All that means there’s very little incentive to develop a new live service game unless you already have a big community for it or a brilliant idea
If you have a lot of money, you’re better off investing in a “Black Myth Wukong” or “Elden Ring” – both of which are outperforming the newest Call of Duty on Steam in revenue – compared to a new random live service game
A lot of it is untracked, though. I know we live in the era of big data, but Blizzard et al has no clue how many people are playing TIE Fighter Total Conversion and countless other old games. 5% is way too low of a made up estimate.
Hell, classic arcade emulators are ubiquitous.
My point here is not that game publishers aren’t making money. My point is, gamers don’t have to buy into it to have fun.
Diablo 2 was my first and favorite, I played the shit out of that game with my friends. We’d join up and rush each other, share equipment, meticulously plan our builds, and kill the strongest stuff we could find.
The story was stale after the first playthrough, and yeah I killed Baal and Mephisto thousands of times, but it was so much fun. There wasn’t an auction house or an ability to buy the best equipment. Leveling up didn’t take forever, so I could build a level 80 character in a few weekends of grinding away.
I played Diablo 3 too, but it felt like they lost the storytelling magic and focused more on monetization. Rifts were cool, but I really just felt like it was more of the same with better graphics and different characters / skill trees. It wasn’t novel enough to grind away my weekends on.
I haven’t tried the latest, and despite having a phone, I refuse to play Immortal or whatever (if that is still around).
I am over Blizzard games at this point … in the 90s and early 2000s they could do no wrong. Since they hitched up with Activision they completely lost the plot.
The only reason the players are “too consumptive” is because the game is designed to not give the player any other way to play. You wanted that outcome, so you designed it so there was no other option.
Don’t you guys have phones??
The same folks that created the real money auction house for Diablo 3, the memes “You think you do, but you actually don’t”; “Don’t you guys have phones?” and Diablo Immoral, continues to show their complete dissociation from reality because money.
Similar to his recent comments about how gamers turned the series towards live-service, Fergusson claims the “consumptive” nature of modern fans means a true, classic Diablo wouldn’t succeed anymore.
Ah yes, it’s the gaymurrs that asked for more fucking live service. Fuck off. To be fair, the actual interview doesn’t have anything saying that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a statement thrown elsewhere, since diablo immoral is full of lootboxes, gems and all the predatory bullshit that works wonders to funnel money. It worked exactly as expected, it’s profitable beyond reason. To conflate that with “gamers want more of that” is pure corporate bullshit and they know it.
(Fergusson): And so we launched that way with D4 and we found out very quickly that if you don’t give me my Uber in my season, then I’m upset. And so we’re like, oh, wow, okay. And now it’s not like, now we actually have an uber currency, uber unique currency that you can go make the one. If you’re not finding it, you can actually go make it for yourself, right? And so, which is very different. It’s just a kind of a recognition of how much players have changed in 20 years. You know, what they, that consumptive nature of a live service and that time is money and I don’t have much time, so let’s go, right? And so that idea of like, oh, you’re going to get a unique every six months. So what are you talking about? I need to get all the unique in six months, you know? And so it’s been, so that’s that clarity that Brent talks about is just putting in players’ hands, getting their actions and adapting."
That’s a “problem” because of how you decided the game should work, as a fucking live service.
For more Diablo coverage, read about Fergusson’s wish to have the ARPG genre renamed to “Diablo-likes”.
Everything old is new again, I guess.
I wish they never discovered that all gamers were monolithic.
Sure thing buddy. Diablo 3 sucked big time, even after all the changes. 4 looked like a huge flaming turd from the trailers, played the beta and it was in fact a terrible game I will never buy. D2 remake? Hours and hours of fun. Path of Exile, the actual closest thing to a D2 sequel? One of the best games I’ve ever played. These people are actually dumbasses.
Edit: Almost forgot Diablo Immortal… Blizzard you can suck my dick and balls with your Diablo Immortal trash.
I played Diablo II so much as a kid and then when the remake came out over twenty years later, it was just as great as I remembered and I play it regularly. I haven’t bought Diablo III or IV.
(It was much harder when I was a kid so I do wish there was more challenge now.)
I picked up the base for III after sinking countless hours in II and LOD. It was so much less fun and more grindy… maybe some people like it, but it didn’t hook me like I & II did. I never even finished the base game I got maybe 10-20yrs tops and gave up. Luckily it was on a steep discount at the time.
He’s not wrong. As much as we loved the old games, it’s hard to go back once you’ve gotten used to the QoL improvements in modern games.
We think we want the old games back, but really we just want the emotions that came with playing it.
We want the old style of games back with the modern QoL changes. Not just remakes.
Modern Corporation:
Just in… we’re re-releasing old classic games, but making every reward 10x harder to earn… but adding in microtransactions so you can get them without having to do all the playing portions.
Is making the game live service a quality of life improvement? There’s still a market out there for Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and Borderlands, after all; a large one.
I’d play D2 over D4 any day
I barely finished my first D4 playthrough because I got bored in the first few weeks.
I was still playing D2 (off and on) 10 years after it’s release.
That was my experience with Diablo 3. Never finished it cause it was boring.
That’s been the elusive key to nostalgia that half of these remake projects (80s and 90s franchise revival movies in particular) don’t understand.
It’s about recreating the experience of doing that thing the first time that people want, not the experience of doing the exact same thing. To recreate that first time experience, you have to understand where your audience is now, and also give them a comparable “new” experience to what they had originally.
I want old games back! Give me more Old School CRPGs damnit, hell give me janky as unpolished Fallout 1 and 2 CRPGs.
That’s exactly one of the inspirations for my post.
I tried playing Fallout 2 again, and it was painful. Couldn’t even force myself to get very far into it.
Sounds like a skill issue. Joking aside I play largely old school games as a baseline, but maybe try playing some newer CRPGs to ease into it like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, or really any of Owlcats games. Also it could be worse ya couldve tried playing Arcanum which is rough even for me to play.
They did try loot and difficulty changes that are closer to Diablo II in style. Players moaned endlessly until they gave up.
I notice path of exile has sucked xi xinpings cock exactly zero times and is also a better game even if they had.
I notice path of exile has sucked xi xinpings cock exactly zero times
In 2018, Tencent became a majority holder in GGG, acquiring 86.67% of the company’s shares.
-sourceI enjoyed Path of Exile, and may give PoE2 a go. But ya, GGG looks set to deepthroat some Xi Xin Pooh cock,
I loved D2 and yes D3. But 4… I’ve tried to play it twice and gave up. It is just such a giant expanse of soul sucking nothing that I’ve not been able to find any “fun” in the game.
