Diablo 4's latest microtransaction controversy is a $30 portal recolor.
Fans despair as Blizzard charges "almost half the price of the game" for class-specific portal colors
All six people who still play Diablo 4 probably bought it though...
Shockingly, it appears that it still has an average 480k daily players
$30 cosmetic microtransactions are reasonable in Path of Exile, imho. But it's free-to-play, and most of their MTX are purely cosmetic.
To get the "full" experience, I suppose you'll want to drop a retail-box-price on a supporter pack to get some stash tabs, but you can reasonably play the game to end game content (30+ hours of play time for the first time for a new player, I'd guess?) without spending a cent.
But MTX in a game that's over $100CAD on release? ಠ_ಠ
There's no such thing. It's just milking people who are crazy enough to fall into the trap of buying them.
$30 is not a microtransaction, thats a macrotransaction, thats an entire other video game.
Free to play doesnt give a game a pass on predatory business tactics, they are free to play for one reason only... to sell you worthless pixels for ridiculous prices. F2P games are designed for that purpose and that purpose only.
But I agree that any paid game should have zero MTX, cosmetic or not. Industry is killing its creative aspect with all this monetisation shit.
Reasonable? Big pass from me chief. Grinding Gear Games isn't some indie studio that needs every penny anymore, they just used the inertia to get people used to dropping 300$ on a game
$300? I've met people that buy the highest supporter pack tier every year plus the highest supporter pack from the seasons. That can add up to over $1k/year.
I think at this point I probably have more than $300 in MTX too, but I paid much more than that to FFXIV sub since 2014.
I haven't played much since before Ascendancy Classes were added to the game, so I'm well out of the loop (although I do keep up with some of the news), so maybe I'm still emotionally attached to the studio I started following in alpha.
That said, I don't really have a problem with their business model. They need to get paid, and they don't sell game-breaking MTX, beyond needing a map tab, a currency tab, and a premium quad tab. I don't regret the money I spent on supporter packs; I got over a thousand hours out of the game.
I spent about 40 bucks on poe. I don't think it's worth spending much more. It's a trap.
I spent about the same on a couple of stash tabs during a sale. I don't regret it. The game gave me a couple of hundred hours of fun. That's more than most games
Didn’t this happen years ago with a mount in WoW?
it died a long time ago
With the Worldstone.
Just don't buy it.
30 is nothing to some people. It's up to them if they want it or not. Doesn't affect you.
Path of Exile players pay this and more with a smile on their faces, but yeah the game is "free to play" (you can barely play the game without buying storage tabs).
For $20 you can buy enough stash tabs to happily play for years with nothing else. You do need more storage and the map tab is very helpful but most of the specialized tabs are not really needed. I have most of the specialized ones and I could easily live without them. So it's a $20 game in my multi-1000 hours in-game opinion. The cosmetic microtransactions are a mixed bag but some are very cool. Compared to the money I spent on D4 which didn't give me much in return, it is not in the same ballpark.
