Diablo 3 Beta

[Geoff_B]

So this article over at PC Gamer makes for an interesting bit of reading (yes I know it's from November but I only just found it)

Look, I understand that the primary purpose for any company is to make money but I don't like the way they say different things to different groups - in this case "No we're not looking to make a profit" to the gamers and "Yes we totally are" to the investors!

[Drunk On Mystery]

Pretty much every for-profit company on Earth will do that.

And claiming that as hypocrisy is especially ludicrous in this case because the quotes in question came from two different people with two very different roles within the company at times that were months apart.

For the lead designer, it very well might not have had anything to do with profit. In fact, I'd be surprised if profit was even considered by the dev team. Any discussion of the problems with D2 that needed to be addressed for D3 would have to include black market item sales, and there really is no simpler, more effective way of addressing that problem than by simply bringing the whole thing in-house and undercutting the market 'til it goes away. Simple, tidy, addresses the problem at hand, and is good for the consumer. That it's also likely to be massively profitable isn't necessarily immediately relevant to the dev team's considerations. They may well have simply considered it a good way to address an enormous problem that Diablo 2 had.

The CEO though? It's absolutely his job to think about profit margins, and it's his job to talk about them at investor conferences. To expect otherwise is to not understand how business works.

[Geoff_B]

And claiming that as hypocrisy is especially ludicrous in this case because the quotes in question came from two different people with two very different roles within the company at times that were months apart.

In that case why was the party line not sorted out at the start? That whatever comments are made would not be seen to contradict each other. If the idea was always going to be "we're looking to make a profit" why was the developer allowed to say that wasn't the case?

[Master Gunner]

Because, from the developers point of view, in his role in the company and how he did his work, it wasn't?

[Drunk On Mystery]

Master Gunner's got it.

I'll give you a parallel: Last year, as part of my job, I figured out how to turn what has always been a 5 day install job into a 3.5 day install job through a combination of better equipment, prep, and efficiency.

If someone asked me if I did that so those installations so the jobs would be more profitable, I'd say no; I did it because I wanted to have more troubleshooting time after the installs were over.

My boss though? She won't shut up about how much money that saves, and how much more profit the jobs give us as a result.

It's not hypocrisy. It's two people with two different sets of tasks and responsibilities looking at something from different perspectives and because of those different perspectives, focusing on different things.

And really: are we really at a point as a gamer culture where we're going to be upset with a game company for coming up with a solution for their newest game to a major problem with a previous game just because that solution is profitable? Are we really THAT entitled?

[Aeralis]

It's less that we're entitled, and more that it's just how human nature works. As a general rule, people hate change, especially when that change involves said person losing more of a certain resource he or she has. People get comfortable with what they know, and changing that shakes them and forces them to re-evaluate how they behave regarding what was changed. It doesn't matter what we're talking about, that's just how people are wired.

You see this all the time when websites get a major redesign. Everyone will go on and on about how much they hate it for a good solid week, even if it is an all-around better layout. You can also see it with the current hot-topic issue of DLC, especially of the launch-day or "on-the-disk" varieties. And the idea of subscription-based gameplay is the same exact thing.

We've spent DECADES in the mindset that "I buy this game once, and all of it is mine forever." It's only relatively recently that the concepts of subscriptions and DLC have been slowly seeping in. And as we, as a whole, are presented with this, it's only natural to instinctively say "Hey, I already bought this game, like I have always done. Why are you taking more money from me?!" It's a drastic change to what we've always known, and it's affecting our most valuable resource: money.

Not all people have an issue with this, and they see it as a fair trade. But there's still a wide margin of people that feel like they're being nickel and dimed, and don't see any difference between this and paying a monthly subscription to keep their new book.