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Comment by stevenjgarner | Hacker News Reader

I am not a gamer, but I am fascinated by all manner of monetization. Is Diablo Immortal unique as a free-to-play game that has a microtransaction model to support continued development, or do other games do this? It seems the equivalent of the freemium model with web applications. Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing? And can "winning" result in a financial reward (like in League of Legends, Super Smash Bros., EVO 2022, Mistplay, etc)? I read that "the 1% of top professional gamers make tens of millions of dollars per year with a combination of sponsorships, ad revenue, and subscriber dues". [1] Mind blowing.

[1] https://thinkcomputers.org/odds-of-gaming-earning-you-money/

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The model is extremely standard in mobile games, especially in Asia, where it has been the norm for almost a decade in gacha games, and where people are used to paying and gambling. They all have the same mechanics, or variations of them, Diablo doesn't really do anything innovative here, but it certainly is on the aggressive side.

A lot of the outrage comes from the fact that 1. Diablo is originally a PC-based IP with a PC gamer fanbase, and PC gamers are used to different monetization schemes and generally don't play mobile games. Even without the gambling mechanics, there already was a huge backlash about Blizzard making a mobile Diablo game 2. Diablo is a "western" IP where such monetization schemes are less common and the penetration of PC players is higher compared to other parts of the world where mobile game penetration is higher.

> And can "winning" result in a financial reward

Generally speaking, no. There are no competitions for these kind of games. The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.

> The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.

Interesting. Why would the publisher have such a ToS? Just so they monopolize the revenue from in-game sales? Or is it more altruistic, like preventing new players having an unfair advantage? I would have thought encouraging a secondary market in their game would actually attract players.

I would imagine it's because they want to avoid people building bots and creating businesses around accounts creation and selling. Once you have such a secondary market you get a cheap supply of accounts due to outsourced labor or bots. This devalues the in-game purchases. Why would I spent more money in-game if I can just buy a cheap account?

Remember also how Diablo 3 was released (in most countries) with a real money Auction House, which was later removed because even the devs realized that it hurt the game ?

What's interesting is Diablo Immortal's monetization introduces a level of indirection compared to Diablo 3's Real Money Auction House (RMAH), and I think it's sufficiently distinct to avoid the same fate.

In D3, you could buy equipment directly from the RMAH. This undermined core gameplay mechanisms since any loot you were likely to find would be inferior to whatever was available for pennies in the store. So why bother running the dungeons at all?

In DI, you don't buy gear directly with money. Instead, you buy access to dungeons with guaranteed drops of high level items which are statistically infeasible to obtain any other way. But this still lends plausible deniability: you're not buying your gear, you're just buying a spin at the (very weighted) wheel.

> Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing?

Yes. Look up “gacha games” [0] for the broader category. One very successful and very rich version of this genre is “genshin impact”

> And can "winning" result in a financial reward

In this case, no, not currently. People tend to structure competitive scenes around games without these mechanics but it could be done by the company developing the game. People are playing for the satisfaction of winning rare items or beating other people on a leaderboard.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game

For a programmer, are those gacha "vending machines" available in code libraries? I would love to experiment with implementing one in a productivity web application.

I am not sure I understand what you mean. The core mechanic is that rewards are randomly distributed - the namesake “gacha” machines dispense a capsule with a random toy. Think of it as a slot machine where if it hits you get an item you wanted / needed for gameplay and if it doesn’t it just took your money and gave you something useless.

Perhaps I need to play to understand, but it sounds like “gacha” machines behave like in-game vending machines where the player can purchase "features" to enhance their avatar etc.? Or do I have that wrong? I just assumed that those “gacha” machines are code libraries in gaming engines (Unity, Godot, GameMaker: Studio, etc), and that maybe a “gacha” machine code library is available open source or in some other fashion.

No, they are wosrse.

Gacha games are mostly card-puller games. You pay $X for X pulls, with more expensive packages giving more pulls with a supposed higher success rate of 'winning' (getting a good/rare pull).

They use hidden weights, as well as max item rolls per day. This means that to keep items rare via artificial scarcity they will only allow so many of those cards to be pulled per X hours/days/whatever but they don't tell you this anywhere. So if that new hot card that just dropped is up for grabs, you buy 10 pulls. But you don't know that it's already been pulled X times by other people, so you have literally no chance to 'win'. So those pulls will be wasted.

The companies always lie about chances to win, the pulls are insane, you can see streamers do massive pulls, the numbers are sometimes out there, just community gathered.

A real life example is one of those light-roulette machines at arcaded where you slam the button to stop the spinning light. The only actual chance you have to win is after $X has been spent on the machine, before that threshold has been met winning is impossible, stopping the light at the correct spot won't matter it will simply roll to the next losing light. Or claw machines are the same and will only actually close enough to grab a toy after $X has been spent.

Gambling is one thing but these skinner boxes masquerading as games are pure evil as they change the rules constantly and make winning downright impossible.

There are many gacha games on the market today that do post their odds and where player-validated data seems to support it. (Some jurisdictions like China and Japan require these kinds of disclosures.) But there are also a lot of markets that don’t require these kinds of disclosures and where there isn’t enough player data to draw a conclusion. So, in that case, how could you have confidence that they are not doing what you suggest? Even if they were, would it even be illegal? (If you never post what the odds are in the first place, is it fraud to keep changing the rules?)

This is why I’ve always been a bit surprised developers haven’t done more to get ahead of these kinds of issues with responsible disclosures and transparency, because it seems to be just inviting regulation. I honestly don’t think most F2P games pull the kinds of slimy tricks you’re accusing them of (most just use simple loot tables and RNG), but there’s nothing holding them accountable to say they can’t because everything is opaque.

Even the disclosure of odds isn’t enough imo, because often it’s odds of a “pull” that costs various amounts of abstracted in game currencies with complicated conversion rates between each other and to the money you put in. It becomes a very complicated math problem most people just ignore.

Even regulated state lotteries do shady shit and are sued due to lying about odds and remaining prizes, and having seen first hand the way those and arcade games work.

I played some when they first dropped and the android playstore options were limited. You could see the bullshit weights first-hand if you had enough free pulls. Again, this, along with streamers doing massive pulls, and community-gathered spreadhseets are where I get my information, not from the game page that says '1 in 100 chance of legendary pull!' because, again, it's always been bullshit.

The machine is a metaphor for gameplay mechanics where you purchase a random chance for a reward. They are not something I can see related to libraries, but a kind of gameplay, in the same way that “leveling up” in an rpg wouldn’t really make sense to me as a library.

Gacha logic must be implemented at server side. It would be hacked very soon if it implemented at client.

At like 50¢/subscriber/month, that adds up fast for people with millions of subscribers. I bet the sponsorships are moreso about figuring out how to fill the streaming time, rather than the payment itself

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