Diablo 3 Failed Because Of The Real Money Auction House

Blizzard's attempts to curb sketchy player trades with a Real Money Action House backfired. How might this affect future Diablo?

[maybelovehate]

Diablo 3 didn't fail. It is still going strong even today. It had a rough launch but grew into a hit.

[CorndogBurglar]

It didn't fail, but the article is right about one thing. They had planned for an entire 2nd expansion that ended up getting cancelled because they didn't have the funds to make it. But again, this was all due to the Auction House screwing players at launch and turning people off from the game.

It seems successful now and the game has been much better since the console versions released. But they are not making enough off of that. But again, maybe they should have created a game that wasn't designed to screw their playerbase out of their money. It took years to remove the Auction House from the game. Which also means they had bad publicity and upset players for that long also. But Blizzard will never own up to that. They would rather say without the Auction House they couldn't make enough money to make the 2nd expansion, which is BS.

[Cobra951]

Console is where I bought the game. It could be played offline (unlike the PC version) and it had no Auction House shenanigans. I never would have bought the PC version, because of the online requirement.

[maybelovehate]

The Auction House failed. Diablo 3 definitely did not. There were reasons the second expansion was never made but it wasn't because the game failed, just World of Warcraft made more sense for expansions since it had monthly subs and was built more around the idea of an expanding universe. Diablo is a different type of game, the way the seasons structure is layed out people don't really want more story. they just want new gear and builds which Blizzard has been adding that.

[antz1104]

Plus the auction house never made it to consoles. This game did great.

[Anon1974]

Diablo 3 is one of the top 10 best selling games of all time. 3 years after launch it hit 30 million sold and is still selling. Clickbait headline.

[WeedyOne]

Diablo 3 grew to be a good game, it just wasn't a good DIABLO game.

The real money auction house wasn't the only thing that made the game a poor Diablo game.

Not grim enough and too colorful, no light radius
No open world PVP
The worst thing IMO is the Cartoon like villains that announce their plans (did not feel evil)
Large bosses that were not scary in the least. Large does not mean scary! The butcher for example is a large boss in D3 that stumbles into a cage for a fight to the death. D1 Butcher is small in comparison but 100X more scary due to his presentation.

Honestly it just felt like they blended too much WOW into Diablo to make D3...

[maybelovehate]

I get that people don't like change, but Diablo 3's art style is amazing. Maybe the best ever in a game in my opinion. It is beautiful.

[CorndogBurglar]

You can't honestly believe that Diablo players don't want more story content. Or that the 2nd expansion didn't get made because of Warcraft.

Come on now, that's just silly. They can keep making new gear all they want, but trust me, people would kill for some actual new content. Gear doesn't make playing the same levels and enemies for years on end more interesting...

[maybelovehate]

I think players would love a Diablo 4, but as far as Diablo 3, no I don't think they want more story. I think at this point they want an entirely new story which would be a new game. But adding story on the end at this point in terms of Seasons is just too much time investment.

[BrainSyphoned]

I made $1000 bucks on the real money auction house in one month before I burned out. It is still the one game my wife was happy to see me playing since she bought us new stuff we needed/she wanted. Now days companies just keep the loot crate money to themselves, griping at blizz for keeping a measly 10%.... well Activision showed all you.

[SamPao]

haha was about to skip your comment because it started like typical spam :D

[maybelovehate]

lol, same

[ForwardDude]

Are we still in 2012? I thought we were in 2019 where the real money auction house is long forgotten and Diablo 3 had an expansion that is quite successful.

[Outlawzz]

I mean according to my memory diablo 3 was a hit. Never even played the game but found lots of ppl talking about it and playing so if that's a failure then I'm not sure wt success would be.

[CorndogBurglar]

At launch it was not a hit. It didn't become a hit until it released on consoles and removed the Auction House.

[harmny]

Lol what is your definition of hit? It sold so many copies servers were overwhelmed for weeks

[Rachel_Alucard]

@harmny

It sold well at launch because its Diablo 3. Player retention was horrible after that and most people ended up quitting shortly after. The same thing happens with many bad games selling way more then the previous good entries only for nobody new to come in and the playerbase dropping it quickly. Like Destiny 2, Anthem, etc.

If it was so well, why did they cancel the 2nd expansion due to funding?

[CorndogBurglar]

This is such an ignorant article.

"Particularly patient traders could become the most powerful of characters in the game without actually doing any fighting. So long as they were watching closely, buying low and selling high, there was no need to play the game, but they could still have the best items."

Having awesome gear isn't all takes to be powerful. You still had to play the game to level up. Gear was still restricted by level. So if you were a level 1 character you couldn't become one of the most powerful players in the game simply by buying the best loot. You could maybe become the most powerful Level 1 character though lol.

"As stated, a casual observer may look at the current state of Diablo 3 and assume it was a successful game, but to Blizzard, the opposite is true. As discussed here, the cancellation of The King of the North expansion for the game was primarily attributed to Diablo 3 not bringing in enough ongoing revenue compared to games like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Overwatch,  ;and Starcraft II."

They can quote Blizzard all they want. But the REAL problem wasn't that they didn't have enough ongoing revenue. The REAL problem that this article fails to mention and that Blizzard will never admit to is that they tried to force players into using the Auction House by restricting the amount of legendary items you would find in a playthrough. When Diablo 3 launched you would be lucky to find 2 pieces of Legendary gear in an entire playthrough. And if you did, you had to be even luckier that it was something you could use. If you wanted a full set of Legendary gear you had to either go to the Auction House and spend money, or grind out multiple playthroughs of the game while keeping your fingers crossed the whole time.

This was a HUGE turn off to fans. Maybe if they didn't implement that shady tactic more people would have bought the game from the get go and they would have made enough from the sale of the base game and 1st expansion to make the 2nd expansion, just like most PC games with multiple expansions did back in 2012.

[Scatpants]

This is the first I'm hearing of it failing. What denotes failure in this instance?

[Rachel_Alucard]

Player retention. At one point, more people were playing Diablo 2 then 3.

[lucian229]

It failed because it sucked. It was weak graphically. Weak gameplay wise, insanely easy even on hard mode, they took pvp out, hell I don't know why people bother with the game today, there are way better games out there.

Diablo 2 was far better

[Chriswynnetbh]

Agreed. Coming straight from D2, it fell totally flat. The RMAH was definitely a fuck up but that wasn't the biggest issue. The art direction and atmosphere took a huge hit. I also feel like the rpg mechanics were totally casualized and lacked the depth that D2 had. Also having the ability to respec at any moment took away the uniqueness of character builds. Not to mention that builds were more gear driven in D3 which ultimately led to RNG having a huge part in which builds were available to you.

[agnosticgamer]

How many copies did it sell? Did it really fail? Or just not perform above what was expected. Two completely different things.

[drunkenspy007]

WTH thegamer.com, are all your articles about games failing when they didn't? You fail crapbait site!

[BlahBlahWhatever]

D3 is trash actually even trash is better than D3 so D3 is worse than trash, it's trash beyond trash.

[DarkZane]

It sold more than 30 millions copies (that number was reported in 2015, so it's obviously much higher now), it's the 3rd best selling game ever on PC and in the top 20 best selling games of all time. How the hell is that a failure to you?

[Tzuno]

Last that i remember it was a phenomenon while AH was ON, the stupid easy loot and sets made the game boring

[Miacosa]

Maybe stumbled out of the gate but in the long-run it did okay for Blizzard at least money wise.

[Sirk7x]

Isn't D3 one of the best selling games of all time?