Every other iteration of that term (play- and -earn and so on) still suffer from the issue I’ve raised on the Mint One podcast several times: everything in Web3 is an investment. One of the chief difficulties for Web3 gaming right now is Play-to-Earn. So, where does Diablo Immortal sit on this broad spectrum? It’s shattered the glass ceiling of what the most egregious Pay-to-Win game could be – and it’s done so in ways so laughably inconceivable that I’ll have to keep hyperlinking sources to prove I’m not inventing these statistics. This is, for the most part, not loathed – however similar MMORPGs, where players can buy the best items from an in-game shop for cash, are demonised. The top guilds invest thousands in the game’s token (which allows real money to be traded for in-game gold) so that they can eke out competitive advantages in the race to complete these new raids first. One example can be found in World of Warcraft whenever a new raid is released. Any game in which a player can gain an advantage by paying real money (legally and within the game’s terms and conditions) could be seen as Pay-to-Win, but there’s many examples where Pay-to-Win mechanics are shrugged off. Pay-to-Win is a revenue model uniformly detested by gamers, but it’s a broad category.

Crowd reaction to diablo immortal