[seoulmetro]

The seed was there before that...

They deliberately hindered the release of Starcraft 2 by releasing the online experience completely unfinished. No clans, no chat (at all), no PMing, no custom games. Nothing. It was like that for several years.

At that point, with 3 years of hype for the game, people came, played a bit of 1v1 then left. It was a botched job. Blizzard died with the release of SC2.

[BiteCode_dev]

To be fair to the team, Tor (from PirateSoftware fame) reported that Blizzard made more money selling one horse in WoW than with the entire Wing of Liberty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZru-6M8BY

That would screw up anybody's motivation a bit.

Players get what they incentivize, and thanks to video games getting more and more popular, the tragedy of the commons applies.

Still, it sucks.

[seoulmetro]

Well, the horse costs only 4x less than the game. WoW has an insanely larger market cap.

It's not crazy that people bought the horse in more $ amounts than SC2's first release. It's crazy that people spent $15 on a single cosmetic.

I don't fully trust piratesoftware guy, since he does do a lot of clickbait, and isn't exactly a well known body from Blizzard. But I do reckon that micro transactions for a larger game would well outsell an old purchase model on a smaller game.

And yeah. We can only blame gamers for the way video games are now. The good games rarely get acknowledged, but the bad games proliferate continuously.