movac

I wonder how much of the outcry over the fee is from poorer countries? (This is a serious question: feel free to reply with links or anecdotes.) $100 may be relatively little in the US or much of Europe, but if you're in India making $80 a month, it's a much bigger barrier.

@Daius:

Not to derail, but the only Dejobaan game I'd call unfinished at release is 1-2-3 Kick It. The rest are complete games, if rather unpolished.

Cliffski, developer of Gratuitous Space/Tank Battles, explains why he thinks the fee is a good idea.

@vhold said:

Keep in mind that one of the main appeals of the Diablo series is that it's fundamentally a big complicated slot machine. Playing the game is like pulling that lever. If the rewards aren't coming out often enough, or aren't satisfying, people will lose their addiction. That's what Blizzard is working on. Those kinds of players, who want to be hooked on the gambling aspect of the game, consider the end-game to be when the game really begins, everything up to that point is just a time investment, a barrier to entry that gives their winnings a feeling of value. Blizzard has to retain players if they want to keep making money on having a big enough community to draw new players, make money on the auction house, and sell expansions.

This is probably where the disconnect is. I look at a game as a set of challenges to be overcome. Those challenges can be discrete challenges designed by the developers, they can be the challenge of defeating an opponent or enemy team, or they can be the repeated besting of records (times, scores, whatever). In a good game, the act of playing is so fun that you'll want to face those challenges repeatedly. (What gamer doesn't have a game they replay every year or 2?)

Finding loot with the right color and a long name is good insomuch as it helps me beat those challenges. But loot and progression for its own sake? Might as well play Progress Quest.

@HydraHam said:

It's 2012 not 1999, games need to evolve. Online games NEED an end game or there really isn't a point in continuing to play unless it's for PVP which isn't added yet. If you want a game where you play till you end then play a non-multiplayer game and yeah you can play this game solo but in reality it's an online RPG. You don't have to do this paragon stuff you can simply finish Act 4 and then stop playing.

What in the nature of multiplayer RPGs means that they need to continue indefinitely? And how does making the numbers continue to increase make the game worth continuing? As I understand it the Paragon system doesn't introduce any new challenges to overcome, it just allows you to make your avatar even more powerful, which (lacking PVP) only serves to make the existing challenges (which presumably you've already cleared) easier.

Blizzard and its customers are too accustomed to MMOs now. What's wrong with making games where you play until you reach the end, then stop (or start over)? (Besides the lack of continuous income, of course.) If the only reason to continue playing a game is that the numbers get bigger, that's... not any reason at all.

Some of you probably read this and thought, "hey, maybe I should check out these text adventure thingies. I'll go download some classic Infocom games." That path leads only to sorrow. Since dying as a commercial form, text adventures have been heavily refined by the online community. The classics from the '80s were well-crafted in many ways, but they were also often frustratingly unresponsive and required absurd leaps of logic. There's a reason the People's Republic playlist only mentions a single game made before the '90s. Classic adventures are still worth playing, but only after you're familiar with the genre's conventions, unless you're persistent to a degree few can manage.

Well, crap. I was planning to check it out some time.

Regarding the "cheap" look, it's worth noting that this is a pre-release developer unit, not the final product.