CriticKitten said:
Jaime_Wolf said:
Businesses make money by pleasing customers. But there's significantly more to it than that. There are very certainly situations where pleasing customers is a bad business decision. You can't ignore that there's generally a cost involved in pleasing customers. If the cost exceeds the money generated by that particular bit of fan service, it is not a good business decision. Even if the feature in question costs less than the expected revenue it generates, it's still a bad decision if that cost could have gone into some other area that would improve revenue more.
So yes, video games are a fan service, but no, that doesn't mean that any feature that pleases customers is a good business decision. I think that was more what he was trying to suggest.
That's certainly fair. There are also times in which it's patently a bad idea to listen to what the customer suggests if only because their suggestion is a terrible one. So on that much, I'll certainly agree.
It's more the notion that video games are not intended to serve their fans that makes me crack up with laughter. Video games are quite unique in that the relative "cost" associated with making them is not nearly as bound by physical means (like purchasing the materials to build a bike or what-have-you). As such, they can typically get away with providing a lot more content for the purpose of pleasing their gaming customers. It's these games that seem disinterested in providing things which their customers clearly are asking for....these are the sorts of questionable decisions that make you wonder what was running through their heads.
What does having an offline single-player cost Diablo 3 exactly? Nothing, really. It's mostly a mix of anti-piracy attempts combined with their attempt to "gently push" the Diablo franchise towards a style of play that resembles MMOs, which in turn allows them to utilize that system for their own financial gain. This is made evident in their "encouragement" of players to try playing the game in multi-player, made prior to this announcement of always-on DRM. It also shows clearly now that the details of the auction house have leaked.
So it's not really a question of cost here, because making the game offline really doesn't cost them much at all and, indeed, probably would boost overall sales even higher than they're going to be. It's a question of "how can we better regulate our own income". Ergo why people are bothered by it.
Very, very few products have substantial material costs compared to design and production costs. Video games are not nearly so unique as people assume - the cost of virtually everything in modern society is primarily a function of labour involved in producing it. The burrito you ate for lunch probably cost a few cents
max in materials. The cost is in leasing the space, paying the employees, etc.
Making an offline single-player mode in Diablo 3 means programming in that option, figuring out what features that means the mode will and will not include, testing that option, etc. There is no box they can just check to add in an offline mode, especially if all of their design have already assumed always-online. All of these things cost money, often a
lot of money. And this is money that could be spent on other parts of the game, which they clearly feel are a better investment. If they thought it would result in higher sales commensurate to the cost (and opportunity cost), they would be adding it in. They're not just malicious and they're not stupid.
Also, regarding control for their own financial gain,
once again the auction house is for OTHER PLAYERS to list items for sale. And it's only in-game items. This is not a typical microtransaction store. The intent is solely to provide a legitimate replacement for the widespread item auctioning via ebay and such that has plagued previous games. The result of the auction house is that people can auction and buy items like they already were, but purchasers can't be scammed, the items will be in a single index and more easily comparable, and rather than a completely unrelated auction site (ebay for instance) taking a small cut of the profit for allowing you to make money from their service, Blizzard takes a small cut of the profit for allowing you to make money from their service.
But hacked items essentially ruin that system, making the auction house largely pointless. This wasn't as big a problem before because there wasn't a single convenient index, so it wasn't necessarily the case that hacked items would end up dominating the index because when you sorted by any given statistic, there might not be too many hacked items as compared to legitimate items. Also, buying hacked items can also lead to being effectively scammed - what if they change the game in such a way that the hacked items no longer work? They're unlikely to make changes that would render normal items unusable, but they have no such obligation toward hacked items (nor any real way to prevent this happening accidentally). It would be incredibly unethical for them to allow you to buy an item from someone that might not work in the future, so they
need some form of protection against hacked items.
So they're taking the cut that ebay would normally get and offering you convenience and security in your purchases. In order to do this, they need to exercise some control over characters that could potentially put things into the auction house. As to why there isn't also an offline mode, I imagine they've found that it's not worth the time and money (it costing significantly more than people assume) to add one in.
