Betting on SWTOR being next. Rift is still doing strong. Actually BETTER since SWTOR launched, or so they report.
Huh?
I have zero fees at my bank…
Zero.
They use all of the money they have stored up to accrue interest, and run prospects, but that’s not what you are talking about.
Cursing is my religion. And Jesus fucking Christ, religion has continuity issues.
Also: I am floating, with my eyes closed, with no sails. I am soaking, I am weathered, by the winter of mixed drinks.
No shit? Rift was pretty okay. Those early instances were a blast.
The point I’m trying to make here is that games still have monthly fees, and games still cost 60 bucks. Nothing out of the ordinary these days and Diablo 3 100% uses its IRL auction house to support itself instead of a monthly fee.
The type of game it is may not require a lot of upkeep, but this is Diablo. The internet is going to shut down. That money will help support the game throughout its lifespan, and I’m okay with that.
Except it doesn’t.
Not any more than D3 did.
It is just another greedy money grab.
.
Cursing is my religion. And Jesus fucking Christ, religion has continuity issues.
Also: I am floating, with my eyes closed, with no sails. I am soaking, I am weathered, by the winter of mixed drinks.
Of course it’s a money grab.
Blizz needs to keep their flow going since people are getting sick of WoW.
So they have 3 plans
[LIST]
[]Auction House cuts in D3
[]SC2 being released 3 times
[*]Trying to lure small kids into World of Kung Fu Panda
[/LIST]
Unlike D2, the whole time you are playing D3 you are authenticating and constaly sending updates to their servers. I have yet to see an article or statement saying that the game wont be played on their servers but I’m very inclined to say they are with all the securities in place now. (If you can find a legit source please link it)
Considering I am a systems administrator for a large company, i know how much it costs to buy and run servers.
TL;DR: iTunes
TL;DR: 7 days!!
D2 stayed around for over 10 years, without it.
All I’m saying.
Cursing is my religion. And Jesus fucking Christ, religion has continuity issues.
Also: I am floating, with my eyes closed, with no sails. I am soaking, I am weathered, by the winter of mixed drinks.
D3 will have a much larger player base than D2. It makes sense that they would need more money to sustain the servers/keep the game updated.
Its about the security of your money.
And banks make money off your debit card, which you use because your money is in their bank, which you use because they charge no fees… the difference is the vendor is charged when the card is used, not the consumer. EXACTLY how RMAH works… the seller is being charged the fee for the services provided to them to have the oppurtunity to sell the item, the buyer doesnt see a difference as they just pay the $10 and goes about life. It doesnt cost shit to put money into your account with Paypal or Blizz does it? ;D
Im not happy about 30% either, its rape… but at the same time I understand it and its also not required for me to use the RMAH to play the game.
TL;DR: iTunes
And that is also when WoW was in it’s hayday.
You could just leave that money in your Paypal and do all of your shopping online.
EDIT: Well, wait, there is a lot of conflicting information floating around. One place says they charge if you transfer from your D3 account to Paypal, another place says they charge if you transfer from Paypal to your bank account.
“PayPal will not charge any fees for transfers to them. You’ll pay a 15% transfer fee to move any funds to your PayPal account, and then whatever you do with the money after that is between you and them. But the transfer to PayPal is 15%, and that’s it.”
The first line doesn’t make any sense.
DOUBLE EDIT: Blizz website spells it out much more clearly. Ignore me.
that would be true if D3 gets content for free, which it does not. PvP patch is already in the works and part of the initial purchase price as it was announced to be part of the main game. I highly doubt we’ll see another Act/Bosses for free. you have to get another Addon for content that pays for it.
D3 has such a slimline upkeep since it uses the battlenet structure WHICH IS ALREADY THERE. there is little to no extra cost for blizzard invloved. RMAH is a simple cash cow. I can’t blame Blizz for trying to get extra money. in the end they are a company like any other that have THEIR own interest before everything else, including the customers who let themselves be milked.
Monthly fee for a game that has no real upkeep cost? Acceptable.
Overpriced mandatory DLC? Acceptable.
Disk-locked Content? Acceptable.
Releasing full price “update” 8 month after release? Acceptable.
Getting the same game over and over again with little to no new innovation or work involved for the same price? Acceptable.
Nowadays people simply acquiesce it, to a degree where it’s “totally fine” because “everyone does it”. I’m sick of that argument, because justifying rip-offs with other rip-offs doesn’t make it more legit a bit.
A new act and bosses isn’t really DLC.
That’s like saying Lord of Destruction was a glorified DLC.
Pay Pal only has fees if you “sell” something. As you do that with the RAMH and PayPal would never accept to do it for free for Blizz, you’ll prolly have a ~3% fee on every sold piece. Transferring from paypal => bank should be free.
/signed.
All of this is why I am pretty much done with console gaming, if the next gen doesn’t rectify those issues.
Cursing is my religion. And Jesus fucking Christ, religion has continuity issues.
Also: I am floating, with my eyes closed, with no sails. I am soaking, I am weathered, by the winter of mixed drinks.
D3 will likely see expansion packs like WoW, and D2. No reason to believe otherwise. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that money earned from the RMAH will go to the further development of D3. Blizzard doesn’t really do “DLC”. WoW has seen a ton of patches that add content for free because the subscription fees support the game. On top of that, it gets full on expansion packs with a ton of content that is fully worth the price.
Company makes product.
Company makes money from product.
Company uses money to expand product.
And uh, again, how high are you right now? It doesn’t matter if bnet is already there, because that doesn’t mean the required server space is already there. They are going to be running a brand new multi(possiblyBILLION)dollar game here… you’re nuckin futs if you think that doesn’t require some seriously expensive upkeep.
Of course there will be Addons, it’s a Blizard tradition, and to be fair their Addons always justify their price. Blizz would rather scrap the game project (SC: Ghost 0/) before releasing a bad game, but the statement “RMAH will finance the Addon” is not true. as I said, that would be true if the Addon would be FREE, but it won’t. The Addon will have a price like any normal game / addon. It’ll be entirely financed through its own selling.
What do you have with your “high”? can’t stand a reasonable normal argument and discussion? is it too “high” for you? Should I add more profane swearing so you understand it better or what?
D2 uses the exact principle that D3 uses. Peer-to-Peer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer). YOU are your own server. Blizzard only has to have a server that does the matchmaking (you create a “server” => match making server lists your server for other people => they can join “your” server). That’s as easy as a normal internet site. Srk.com’s server could prolly handle that with a small upgrade.
The “data storage” is SO MINIMAL, every forum, every website, everything basically that has a “profile feature” has a database behind it - and it’s so unbelievable cheap (in proportion) for Blizz that you wouldn’t believe it. That said, I’m pretty sure they don’t need to upgrade ANYTHING. They simply use the established Battlenet, which already handles MILLIONS of players world wide for WoW, Wc3 and SC2. why would Diablo 3 requires anything new? You have the same account for all games, too. There will probably an own server per currency that handles the auction hause system, tho. But that is required for safety reasons and due to the different currencies.
Why is it so hard for you to grasp that the RMAH makes money for Blizzard, and thus helps fund their games? What is so difficult about this concept? Any amount of money that Blizzard receives helps to fund their projects. I’m saying that the RMAH is a better model than if they had decided to charge a monthly fee to us, the players, in order to maintain a revenue stream via Diablo 3.
Diablo 3 requires something “new” as in, more hardware to handle it. Something has to be purchased and maintained in order to sustain the players. You’re totally right. Bnet handles a ton of people, but when you suddenly add potentially millions of other players/accounts, you need a little something something. That server space doesn’t come from nowhere, and it isn’t cheap. Does Blizzard have the money to throw down on millions of dollars worth of servers? Absolutely. All of that is probably already in place and has been for quite some time, but it still costs a ton of money to maintain, despite the amount of storage its using.
Blizzard, if they are smart (and they are), would have separate servers for all of their games. That way, if WoW servers go down, SC2 and D3 servers don’t and so on.
Where I work we have a relatively small server room that houses a bunch of data for a couple of buildings. We have somewhere around 50-100tb worth of space I think. The entire server room is pretty dang small. It’s mostly for storage and virtualization. That was millions of dollars. A few years ago I remember some article about it costing Blizzard 200 million per year to run WoW. Now that covers everything from staff wages to server maintenance, but still. That’s some scratch. I’ll have to find the video or interview for you here, but Jay said something about how D3 uses a similar structure to WoW.
[LEFT]Now think of storing all the data for 3.3 million SC2 players worldwide, give or take (sc2ranks.com)[/LEFT]
[LEFT]However many WoW players there are now. Is it still 10 million?[/LEFT]
[LEFT]StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, WC3, and maybe WC2? Maybe a couple hundred thousand, but that might be being generous. [/LEFT]
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
[LEFT]Then toss in a couple million D3 players.[/LEFT]
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
[LEFT]That is not a cheap venture. Period. It can’t be argued against. [/LEFT]
He is saying it doesn’t fund the game, itself, per se.
It funds Blizzard.
Yes, there is a distinction.
One is the dev team, and their endeavors, one is Blizzard AKA stockholders.
Corporations are people too, so I hear.
Which is further evidence that humanity is shit.
Derail time?
Cursing is my religion. And Jesus fucking Christ, religion has continuity issues.
Also: I am floating, with my eyes closed, with no sails. I am soaking, I am weathered, by the winter of mixed drinks.
I don’t like this garbage talk that usually happens a week before release! I’m glad I’m not a hoarder, after I look out for myself and friends I am selling shit that I can make money from! Yeaaaa!