As long as cosmetics can also drop as part of playing the game, I don’t care if the shop’s charging people $25 for a gear set, because I don’t need to buy it.
Two massive differences between TOTK and Diablo 4 though - TOTK is not intended as a live service game with (presumably) years of intense support and extended development post launch, and TOTK is a first party game developed by the most successful video game console company to ever exist - meaning it’s an investment into selling more of their consoles. But mainly the first one. Diablo 4 is going to have seasons of content and according to one developer, 2 DLCs and prolonged support. So it’ll probably end up costing an order of magnitude more than TOTK to produce/support.
I feel these ‘seasons of content’ have limited value, it’s much better to produce something fully functional in the first place. We’ve all gotten used to paying more for less. Of course we can say ‘constant purchases is more profitable for studios’ but does that mean we should accept it? I’ve never been impressed by live service games.
My engagement with them varies from game to game, honestly. For me, the decision to spend extra money on a game I’ve purchased boils down to whether I enjoy the game enough to make it feel worth the money to me. I’ll ask myself if I will feel like I’ve gotten $20’s worth of fun out of it - which might be a crappy question to have to ask myself given that we used to buy games once and be done paying, but that’s where we’re at with the industry.
As it sits with Diablo 4 specifically, though, a cosmetic-only cash shop is something I can peacefully coexist with. I’d rather there be no microtransactions, because I’m not an Activision shareholder, but if there’s going to be some, let them be for optional content only. Besides which, the non-paid gear looks cool as hell to begin with.
To me, whenever I have to put in more cash after the initial purchase I pretty much feel exploited. Not saying I never buy DLC but often what you get in DLC is nowhere near comparable to the hard work put in by mod developers who aren’t getting paid at all (eg HOI IV). I think things will just keep getting worse unless governments put a stop to it.
