Former Blizzard employee and lead designer of Diablo 3, Jay Wilson has never liked to mince his words. Now, during the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, he spoke to two other ex-Blizzard employees about their time at the studio – and didn’t say a good word about Activision.
Wilson commented in particular on the different ideas about a business model and made Activision responsible for the heavily criticized Free2Play game Diablo Immortal. Wilson left the company in 2016, many years before the release of Immortal.
Diablo 4 is now in the starting blocks and the beta testers are already enthusiastic:
Diablo 4
Beta testers leak gameplay and are very happy with the game
They really wanted a free2play Diablo
The impetus for the topic was the question of how strong Activision’s influence on Blizzard’s business models was. Jay Wilson replied as follows:
Activision’s impact on Blizzard has been like a frog in a pot of boiling water. At first it didn’t feel like anything. But later, the products that were newer and made money had tremendous production pressures. […] Diablo III was a very solid premium box model and wasn’t that badly affected, but a lot of the talk about Immortal before I left came from Activision Blizzard. They really wanted a free-to-play Diablo and I didn’t – admittedly, I was already off Diablo by then.
You can also watch the interview yourself in the following video, the Activision question starts at minute 44:12:
link to YouTube content
The Diablo 3 lead designer also sees the departure of some developers as a result of the controversial business models:
Activision had a major impact on business models. In my opinion, many high-level Blizzard employees left because they got too frustrated with Activision’s business models. I also think that these business models didn’t make the games better.
Wilson even goes a step further, implying that Activision’s business model was inappropriate towards gamers:
We always wanted to be ‘the good guys’, so we always wanted to do what was right for our players. […] So we wanted to charge players a price for a game that we felt was reasonable. And that came in direct contradiction [mit Activision].
How Diablo will continue to develop with the fourth main part of the series is of course still unclear. However, Diablo inventor David Brevik is confident:
more on the subject
The Diablo inventor is extremely positive about the future of action role-playing games
Auction house in Diablo 3 shouldn’t be profitable at all
That wasn’t the only exciting finding of the interview. As Wilson also claims (minute 40:40 in the video), the controversial real-money auction house in Diablo 3 was not intended to bring in a lot of money. Instead, there should be an in-game auction house make life difficult for hackers and thus provide more security.
The profit from the auction house was also manageable and it would have surprised him if it grossed more than $15 million, according to Wilson. What initially sounds like a lot of money is not a lot in the big picture. World of Warcraft probably did this every ten seconds
said Wilson jokingly.
Maurice speculates on what the Diablo 4 shop could look like in the following video:
31:17
Diablo 4 without Pay2Win? – How bad is the shop going?
In addition, Wilson revealed why the auction house was not directly removed from the game. The reason was the fear that it could have legal consequences – the game’s packaging was actively advertised with the auction house. In 2014, the unloved feature was ultimately removed from the game.
Are you looking forward to Diablo 4 or are you skeptical after Immortal? Write it to us in the comments!
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