I didn’t even realize this Q&A had occurred (I rarely look at the main D3 page on the Battle.net site). Nothing really new anyway except the same bullcrap.
The biggest thing that stood out to me was this question and the response:
Are there plans on adding purchasable cosmetic items, such as pets, portraits, wings, etc.?
Wyatt Cheng: There are a lot of different factors that go into decisions like this, including various regional or local market considerations. We know that some of these features would be ones that players in several regions might enjoy, but we don’t currently have plans to support these in other regions.
That said – I love that there is room for lots of pets, wings and portrait frames. I hope we’ll be able to use this system for various rewards. For example many of you may have seen that you can earn a unique Heroes of the Storm Portrait Frame and Pennant for reaching account level 12 in Heroes. There’s also the Season Journey rewards with the Frost Hound pet and the cool new Portrait Frames.
It’s actually incredible how Blizzard’s executives don’t seem to even be interested in monetizing cosmetics in D3 as this would be a source of recurring revenue. That is something they still need to find because back before D3 vanilla launched, they did mention that they weren’t going to make the same mistake they did with D2 where there was no system in place to generate revenue to keep those servers running. By comparison, the server environment for D3 is far more complex compared to D2 and thus far more costly to maintain (not just hardware wise, but also the backend databases). True, some of this cost was factored into the retail price of the game (as was probably some level of attrition rate from players who stop playing it).
One of the RMAH’s goals was to be a partial source of funding once D3 eventually goes into the same sort of maintenance mode that D2 is in. But that is long gone now. Cosmetic MTX is a huge business opportunity and these folks are seemingly willing to leave it on the table (they have all the necessary frameworks in place with the China client to roll it out quickly – though I still say the best time to do this is with the next expansion).
In-game earned rewards does not mean that cosmetic microtransactions are mutually exclusive (you can have both).
But I can also see their marketing tactics at play (as per the above cross marketing play with how one can earn such rewards by playing their other games). Some of the microtransaction cosmetics for the China region can basically serve as future “content” rewards in the existing US, EU, and Asia regions (thus basically no additional art work needed in the future).
The thing is that (which I’ve written about before) if I’m not interesting in playing one of their other properties, no amount of reward is going to get me to play it. I played the World of Warcraft Starter Edition for only a short time and knew that it wasn’t for me. So even though I own the Collector’s Edition of D3, RoS, and SC2/Heart of the Swarm, I know very well that all of those in-game items for WoW is something I’ll never really get to see (and I don’t care).
The only two Blizzard franchises that I’m a customer of is Diablo and StarCraft. The latter (SC2) is coming to a close though and I really have no further interest in where they take it next if they do decide to proceed with a StarCraft 3. With Diablo, I personally feel that any follow on past the D3 story arc like say a D4, won’t have actual game play that is really ARPG in nature (not with this design team AND Blizzard’s current philosophy).
I stopped playing Hearthstone awhile ago and Heroes of the Storm isn’t something that holds my interest for long periods of time. And Overwatch? I’m not interested in any FPS type games.
My point though with cosmetic microtransactions in D3 is that they are leaving serious revenue on the table. And that is ironic because Blizzard in general is hellbent on keeping all of their franchises online only (piracy prevention) and thus have to incur all of the expenses involved in that (that includes administrative and support staffing).
