I’ve been playing a lot ofDiablo 4recently, and I’m loving it. In fact, here at Dualshockers, we’re all loving it (just check out my colleagueEmma Ward’s reviewfor confirmation). It may not be the most innovative title we’ve ever seen, but it’s a quintessential Diablo experience. All the gear-grinding fun, wrapped up in a wonderfully dark and atmospheric narrative. It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted.
There is, however, an elephant in the room: I speak of course of the “shop”. Every time I opened my map, there it was, flashing its little yellow light at me. Everything in there is purely cosmetic of course, so it could be worse, though I’m of a mind that itstill spoils the funif you can’t obtain vibrant cosmetics through actually playing the game.
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I was resolved to spend as little time as possible even looking at the shop, but I did poke my head around its door out of morbid curiosity once or twice, and having done so, I am speechless
Our Rob Zak has already pointed out the ironyof how we used to mock Oblivion’s $2.50 horse armour, and yet Diablo 4 charges several times more for the same thing, but that’s not even the worst of it.
The cosmetics on offer are split up into several items, which you have to buy in a pack, which is a thinly veiled attempt to increase the perceived value. Each set matches, so you’re really just buying one costume that comes in several arbitrary pieces. There’s no option to buy just the hat, or just the boots if that’s all you want.
These packs can only be bought with a premium currency called platinum, which is really just another means of detaching your in-game spending from real-world money, with the goal being to get you to spend more. Having to convert your money into platinum makes it harder to keep track of how much you’re spending, and because you’re able to only buy fixed amounts of the stuff, it means you’ll almost always have a surplus of the currency sitting around, and to spend it all you’ll (paradoxically) need to buy more, so you have enough for whatever items you need.
Here’s the kicker though. Some packs of cosmetics, like the Wraith Lord set, go for up to 2800 platinum, which costs, wait for it, $24.99 in real money. This is forone costume.I can’t in good conscience call that a microtransaction and neither should anyone else. So what should we call it? Megatransactions? Macro-DLC?
Now, most people who hear about “microtransactions” from yet-another games journo will just roll their eyes and get on with their lives. I get it: this is just the way things are now, and if someone else wants to spend a few quid on a new toupee for their necromancer or whatever, so be it. But we can’t give companies like Blizzard free rein to keep increasing their prices while keeping what we get for our money the same. This kind of thing happens by inches, and I don’t want it to get any worse. Who knows what we’ll be expected to pay twenty dollars for in a few years time? Horseshoes? Character slots?
There’s a comparison to be made here between Diablo 4 andPath of Exile, another ARPG that also offers players the chance to purchase a premium currency, but handles it a lot better. You can buy pieces of armour individually, making it easier to spend what you want, and frequent sales (which may or may not come to Diablo) are a nice touch.
Right now, you can spend $30 at the Path of Exile shop and get a pack containing (among other things) a ring, a new pet, and an extended digital soundtrack, as well as 300 points of the premium currency (which is worth $30 itself). If I am going to spend money at an in-game shop, this is the kind of stuff I like to get.
Even more embarrassing for Diablo, the costs of various weapon and armour sets across the two games are roughly comparable, which doesn’t sound so bad until you remember that Path of Exile is free-to-play. It’s a lot easier to justify microtransactions when you aren’t asking for money upfront.
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Blizzard are not alone in their money-grubbing efforts.Gran Turismo 7(another full-price game) was heavily criticised for similar reasons, with a monetisation structure with its own premium currency, in which fancier cars like the Porsche Spyder or a Ferrari F50 cost comfortably over $25. There was widespread condemnation, which was nice to see, but everyone kept saying “microtransactions”, which, at a glance, makes the whole thing seem less of an issue.
Gamers are now expected to pay the cost of a whole new game for something without a fraction of the value. We can’t let publishers use premium currencies, battle passes and the like, to disguise the fact that they are taking more and more money off us under the seemingly innocuous guise of “microtransactions”. So how about it? Let’s adapt the term to ‘Megatransactions,’ which paints a more accurate picture of what’s actually going on here.
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