Aside from WoW, I think Diablo may be the game with the highest amount of posts on this blog. To say that it was a massive factor in my gaming years is an understatement.

With that said, it may come as a surprise that I have not played and do not own Diablo 4. My personal boycott of Blizzard games (both Overwatch, the last 2 expansions of WoW included) has been rather easy to maintain since a) there are alternatives in the genre that are as good or better and b) have you seen the amount of quality non-Blizzard games out there? I keep posting more and more of them!

Though clearly Diablo 4 is played by a lot of people. It made $1b in box sales and an astonishing $150m in micro-transactions. All those micro-transactions are cosmetic, so folks out there are spending ~$10m a month for new rags. It’s just a lot to digest, you know?

People paid $70 for the box ($40 more for the expansion) and then paid another $11 of cosmetics. Ok, clearly that’s not what happened and rather a very small subset of the population spent money on battlepasses or individual cosmetics. Enough of them to inflate the %. Unless my math is wrong here, this is borderline MMO subscription numbers here. So I guess congrats to Blizzard on finding a monetization method that works? I guess this helps their execs sleep better on cushions of cash while they layoff more developers. That may be snark, but it’s also the entire farking point of being part of a multi-billion dollar enterprise, that when one part does well, it offsets another. But who am I to judge?

Back to topic. Clearly there are a lot of folks with disposable income and clearly there are companies willing to exchange virtual temporary goods for those dollars. Also, the Earth is round. Deep Rock Galactic and Path of Exile would not exist if that wasn’t the case. Color me impressed at how Blizzard is able to get people to part with their money, at such high rates. And I guess to those who have not bought any microtransactions, you should probably thank those that do, as they are the ones who are paying the server hosting fees and future development costs.

No wonder AAA game development hasn’t fully crashed. It keeps getting propped up by stories like this one and the hope that someone else can find a golden goose.