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In this interview, the lead designer for Diablo and Diablo II talks about how shitty Diablo III is. He tried his best to avoid coming right out and explicitly saying that it's shit, though, even if it seemed like he really wanted to say it.
I didn't much care for his half-assed attempts to justify the auction house, though. "I don't think it's a matter of being greedy. Game developers, we work hard, and we want to be rewarded for what we do. The fact that Diablo II was still on shelves and still being played, in Korea particularly, 10 years after the fact of its release was something that I think Blizzard was kind of like... 'Hey, we got the price of the box and not much else out of that.' That doesn’t respect the amount of gameplay that people were clearly getting from it. So I can definitely see that point of view, where they say, “Hey, we should be rewarded for what we’re giving the audience,” and then think about ways to do that."
So, what he's saying is that they wanted more than what they got for, you know, selling the damn games. They got paid... but that isn't enough. They want more. Um, yeah, that sounds to me exactly like "a matter of being greedy." Only in the goddamn video game industry have I seen this asinine mindset that just selling the fucking game isn't enough anymore. You don't see authors of books getting all whiny about people still reading and rereading their books years later, for one example.[1] Now, game devs/pubs feel justified in milking gamers for every little thing in any way they can get away with. Obviously the majority of gamers let them get away with a whole lot (far too much, in my opinion), because if they hadn't, all of this shit would have been nipped in the bud a decade ago when it all first started becoming a thing. And the ways they're coming up with to get that extra cash are becoming increasingly insidious, like this real money auction house bullshit. It's becoming intolerable, if it hasn't reached that point already. It already has for me, since I still haven't bought and won't be buying Diablo III until and unless the extraneous layer of crap (RMAH, always-online DRM, etc.) is stripped out (and, no, before anyone even asks, I'm not buying the fucking PS3 version of the game which doesn't have that stuff, because if they can take it out of that version, they can damn well sell a version for PC that doesn't have it as well). At this point, that seems highly unlikely to ever happen, and I'm pretty much okay with the idea of never playing Diablo III. There are plenty of other, better games out there that don't do that bullshit in the first place.
[1] - And don't give me that malarkey about how games are totally different because it requires gigantic teams of hundreds of people to make them. No. Plenty of games have been made and are still currently being made by teams of one to three people, and many of those games I've liked a hell of a lot better than most of the developed-by-committee so-called triple-A games that have been shat out lately by the big dogs.
I didn't much care for his half-assed attempts to justify the auction house, though. "I don't think it's a matter of being greedy. Game developers, we work hard, and we want to be rewarded for what we do. The fact that Diablo II was still on shelves and still being played, in Korea particularly, 10 years after the fact of its release was something that I think Blizzard was kind of like... 'Hey, we got the price of the box and not much else out of that.' That doesn’t respect the amount of gameplay that people were clearly getting from it. So I can definitely see that point of view, where they say, “Hey, we should be rewarded for what we’re giving the audience,” and then think about ways to do that."
So, what he's saying is that they wanted more than what they got for, you know, selling the damn games. They got paid... but that isn't enough. They want more. Um, yeah, that sounds to me exactly like "a matter of being greedy." Only in the goddamn video game industry have I seen this asinine mindset that just selling the fucking game isn't enough anymore. You don't see authors of books getting all whiny about people still reading and rereading their books years later, for one example.[1] Now, game devs/pubs feel justified in milking gamers for every little thing in any way they can get away with. Obviously the majority of gamers let them get away with a whole lot (far too much, in my opinion), because if they hadn't, all of this shit would have been nipped in the bud a decade ago when it all first started becoming a thing. And the ways they're coming up with to get that extra cash are becoming increasingly insidious, like this real money auction house bullshit. It's becoming intolerable, if it hasn't reached that point already. It already has for me, since I still haven't bought and won't be buying Diablo III until and unless the extraneous layer of crap (RMAH, always-online DRM, etc.) is stripped out (and, no, before anyone even asks, I'm not buying the fucking PS3 version of the game which doesn't have that stuff, because if they can take it out of that version, they can damn well sell a version for PC that doesn't have it as well). At this point, that seems highly unlikely to ever happen, and I'm pretty much okay with the idea of never playing Diablo III. There are plenty of other, better games out there that don't do that bullshit in the first place.
[1] - And don't give me that malarkey about how games are totally different because it requires gigantic teams of hundreds of people to make them. No. Plenty of games have been made and are still currently being made by teams of one to three people, and many of those games I've liked a hell of a lot better than most of the developed-by-committee so-called triple-A games that have been shat out lately by the big dogs.
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Date: 2013-08-01 07:21 pm (UTC)From:But hey, let's blame pirates and used game sales instead.