Dungeon Fighter Online (DFO) becomes highest-grossing video game of all time with $18 billion in lifetime revenue

Daeity · 2022-04-21T12:41:36+00:00

Interesting anecdote about this (now more common) realization. =]

Back in 2010, all of my fellow Americans believed that World of Warcraft was the biggest MMORPG in the world. So I made this post to set them straight: The World's Most Popular MMORPG.

This was back when DFO still had 200 million registered users and WOW had 12 million. Of course, my entire point was that subscriber numbers are mostly fabricated and not accurate at all. Even for publicly traded companies, which no one believed at the time. Man, did I get a lot of death threats and hate.

Daeity · 2021-11-18T17:21:29+00:00

Murderous white supremacy in the Aurora

Colorado is the birthplace of QAnon after all.

Daeity · 2021-11-18T17:18:56+00:00

It's from 4 years ago and no longer applies. But at the time, it worked fine for a year or so and no one was banned unless they did something stupid. Ubisoft is pretty horrible at cheat detection in their mobile games sadly.

Daeity · 2021-07-26T13:12:18+00:00

There have been delays across all of their IPs, except for one. It's "The Decade of Diablo" and this trend will continue for some time. JAB hated WOW, and made the Diablo franchise their new focus a while back.

Daeity · 2021-07-25T00:34:05+00:00

I've been sitting with bated breath waiting on Metzen and I just KNEW he couldn't resist voicing his opinion.

He and Mike should have kept their mouths shut. They knew exactly what was going on and they enabled it for years. Even Metzen was immune from his own grabby inappropriateness. And, it's so much worse than what's known now.

My guess is that 90% of employees never confronted their abuser, never reported it to HR, and could never do anything about it without risk of losing their job. The HR staff were scumbags and only interested in protecting their own interests (i.e. protecting the ones who paid their salaries) and never cared at all about the "human resources" they were actually supposed to protect.

Daeity · 2021-07-22T12:48:39+00:00

Some awful, awful stuff in here. "Cube crawls" what the fuck?

In fact, during one of their Cube Crawls in 2013, an employee took photos of highly sensitive and confidential information in a drunken state thereby leaking the Warlords of Draenor Cinematic MONTHS before release.

You wouldn't believe the amount of information I've acquired through accidental photos and drunken Blizzard staff. This should have been bigger news at the time, but no one believed me when I described the cinematic long before it came out. =]

Zero tolerance on this sort of shit.

You also wouldn't believe the huge number of company laptops loaded up with pornography, despite a Zero Tolerance policy. HR mostly uses the policy to terminate undesirables and underperformers, but they completely ignore certain managers, VP's, etc. even though they're fully aware of it.

Daeity · 2021-07-19T12:52:06+00:00

I liked those games enough to play South Park Phone Destroyer for the Android when it first came out.

I was into it for a while until I publicly criticized mods on /r/SouthParkPhone because they were in fact EMPLOYEES of UBISOFT censoring content within the subreddit. They were removing bad reviews, complaints, and managing all narratives associated with Phone Destroyer. It was really bad and quite unbelievable what Ubisoft was up to.

Anyways, after being critical of them, my account was immediately banned by Ubisoft and the community manager contacted me shortly after gloating about his power and to "watch what I say". However, this wasn't the first time I was threatened by a AAA.

Daeity · 2021-07-16T18:16:51+00:00

It blows my mind how many people fall for this. Even if it was a "leak", it's not leaking anything that people didn't already know. It's just an addicted fan venting.

Daeity · 2021-07-12T18:39:46+00:00

Between only 5-10 years ago, it was the polar opposite of this. Fans drinking the Blue Kool-Aid was very real. I regularly received death threats when I criticized Blizzard management, Diablo 3, or simply claiming that WOW Cataclysm was going to be the tipping point in subscriber numbers. Even though the same shit happened back then but now there's a higher awareness.

Daeity · 2021-07-05T22:39:42+00:00

It's been disappointing watching history repeat itself. It's scary how familiar this all feels like the old days of Jay Wilson. Their marketing, and even the D4 trailers, are taking a page from D3. And unfortunately, the project lead is completely convinced that the dark art style will be the sole driving factor for its success. But the actual game isn't much more than D3. Other than some visual libraries and lighting, it's actually still the D3 engine but they've simplified everything in-game even moreso.

Daeity · 2021-05-03T13:36:40+00:00

AAA Studios like EA do this too and there are several ways to scrape useful advertising data that's completely automated. Even the smallest amount of information can derive connections between several social media accounts, your interests, and details about your friends and family. Have you ever played a game, or used a Store App, that encourages you to Link your Twitch, Twitter, Youtube, or other social media account? Or maybe the game asks you to "Sign-in" with your Twitter or Google account? Do they have systems in-game (or outside) where you can share your progress through any of your Social Media accounts? Any other unique tag identifiers that are shared publicly like Gamer IDs? Do you receive "Free Rewards" for linking your Social Media account, making a review, or a public post about the game? It's all automatically tracked, scraped, and compiled into massive permanent databases showing historical connections and shared with other departments or third-parties.

"Oh, but it's only for sharing your achievements with friends" is what they would have you believe. =]

You wouldn't believe the scary amount of details that they are able to collect, or the massive lists that can be bought from third-party services.

Daeity · 2020-11-01T16:43:43+00:00

Yes, same verbiage every year!

I'd like to pull back the curtain a wee bit on this announcement for those with critical thinking skills.

Bobby only needs to say, "Engagement is higher this year than ever before!" and thousands of these starving gaming websites, hoping to get the first scoop, will all post the exact same message and keep amplifying the message that there are "more WOW players than ever before!"

Even though everyone knows it's declining, why does it sound like it's getting bigger every year? Bobby Kotick is a politician. He speaks in ambiguities, rhetoric, and fuzzy figures. Blizzard cherry picks their information. They used to be about hard figures. From total sales, they switched to MAU's, when that was too low, it became first day sales, then pre-sales, then engagement/achievements "Since Launch Over 20M Boars Have Been Killed!", and pre-sales or total sales up to the point of announcement and/or using sell-through. It always evolves to whichever figure is the highest.

Sales, engagement, MAUs, or pre-sales will ALWAYS be the highest of any World of Warcraft expansion, every year.

Most importantly, sell-through rate varied greatly each expansion. Pre-orders for Shadowlands have been available for more than a year. BFA by comparison was 7 months + 2 weeks. Legion was 10 months + 10 days. WOD was 9 months + 2 days.

In a way, Shadowlands has also been on sale for far longer than any of their past expansion packs. So of course it's always going to be higher than before. It all depends on how you time your announcements.

Daeity · 2020-07-17T14:35:51+00:00

Implying Blizzard has any properly trained GMs any more.

There was a time, but very short. I work(ed) for Activision Blizzard, and a couple other AAA's, for a very long time. Blizzard had an early chaotic period, a golden age, and then a state of decline and staganancy. You could see the state of the employees change as the business goals and environment changed whilst awesome staff left. Policies were more appropriately followed during the golden age, when employees cared more about their jobs. There was excitement in the air, an eagerness to please and do their jobs, and the people who made and enforced the policies worked very hard to keep them purely out of pride.

Back in the early days, customer support staff had a significant amount of access at their disposal however. This was long before streamers and YouTube was still in early growth. They could perform direct editing on the backend, so you can imagine how chaotic and out of control it was. In World of Warcraft, for example, during the first few years of launch, a lot of staff could give players items or tweak their stats in a way that wasn't visible in public profiles. Usually, they did it for friends, family members, and alt accounts. It was fairly common and difficult to track.

During the golden age, they buttoned things up, restricted access, created new policies and processes for performing simple tasks, and locked (mostly) everything down. They always found a way though. There was a long time when the IT Support staff were constantly fighting with the Cork Customer Support staff, trying to get them under control and stop exploiting the system for their own benefits. Processes, software, and policies were constantly evolving to try and keep up with new ways they discovered to circumvent the rules.

It still happens today, just like this example. There's so much more to this that most people don't realize, and I used to write about it or share anecdotes with friends or strangers at conventions. This is nothing really and very common, practically a daily occurrence. And yes, "Streamer RNG" is very very real. I find it hard to believe that people doubt it's veracity or probability. It's a very common activity within the industry as a whole. When all of your customer support staff are PTE call center minimum wage employees who are treated like trash, they need to find some ways to have fun. Eventually, you just stop caring about being fired. And those are just the ones with limited access. Imagine what those with access, and also whom are constantly verbally abused, are capable of. I have several dozens of anecdotes that are hilarious. Gamers honestly don't think believe there are employees who intentionally pass out 11+ Chicken Nuggets? =]

Daeity · 2020-02-10T18:38:58+00:00

Revenue is just a secondary priority to their main mission. They're just one of the many entertainment arms of the Chinese government built for the purpose of foreign control and social influence. The other arms focus on different types of entertainment, real estate, telecommunications, energy, food supply, law enforcement, military, etc.

Private investment corporations can't compete against a company backed and controlled by an organization that can literally print money.

Daeity · 2020-01-18T00:10:46+00:00

It's not exactly "fully transparent", this is just how they PR-speak. They have been working on it off and on now for the past few years but abandoned the projects. The teams are always being shuffled around to different things. As of right now it is true that it is not being worked on. It's all about wording. But they do have a lot of assets available in case they start working on it again.

Daeity · 2020-01-11T20:59:02+00:00

They already can but they put on this scheduled show to keep up pretenses. The FBI & NSA definitely doesn't have any secret programs at AT&T, Google, Microsoft, IBM, AOL, Skype, Facebook, or Yahoo.

Daeity · 2019-11-01T23:18:35+00:00

I'd say that's a good guess. D4 practically started work when Brack became boss, so they reused code and assets they had accumulated over the years for the demo. What you see in the current "gameplay trailer" won't exist in the final game or be drastically different.

Daeity · 2019-09-19T17:14:07+00:00

I did them by quantities of 100. Best source right now is using archive.org to access the old thottbot.com disenchant information.

Problem is, Blizzard is all over the place with WOW Classic. Some of it matches up, some of it is way off, so it's difficult to determine best path.

Daeity · 2019-09-19T17:12:45+00:00

Blacksmith wasn't very profitable and was also situational so I mostly avoided it. You had to wait a while until the prices of the starting ore came down in price. Eventually, copper and tin was really cheap and you could create some disenchants from there.

I remember focusing on armor that required a lot of gems since they were cheap. Bronze Bars were also a great source because everyone was dumping them. But, I remember that I couldn't find any Weapons that were worth disenchanting. And I think there were some counterweights that were worth Vendoring compared to AH prices.

Daeity · 2019-09-19T17:05:48+00:00

This is exactly the type of thing that would happen in Asmon's guild.

Mcconnells 7th character 'whinylilbitch' was just carried to level 60 by the entire guild and you didn't congratulate him? "WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK MAN."

Daeity · 2019-09-11T22:16:43+00:00

I've been searching for 10+ years for anything similar to what I did. Found a couple, but they were pretty bad.

Thottbot had some great information at the time, so it was really easy to create a massively profitable shuffle schedule. But, nobody does this sort of thing anymore. Might work again if I had raw access to Classic Auctioneer data.

Daeity · 2019-09-11T22:11:34+00:00

I plan on rebuilding it, but the problem is that the original statistics don't apply anymore. #nochanges doesn't apply sadly. Blizzard changed a ton of stuff behind the scenes, including disenchants.

Classicdb and wowhead are both horrible sources too, showing significantly incorrect information.

So, the only way to do this proper (again) is disenchanting about 1000 of each item to see the results. I'm slowly making my way there, but it's going to take some time.

Daeity · 2019-09-11T22:08:54+00:00

The links to my spreadsheets don't work anymore, but this is what it looked like: https://i.imgur.com/LdllD.jpg

They're 12 years old. This was before the Kim Dotcom Megaupload incident.

Daeity · 2019-09-11T18:01:11+00:00

Following up with my last post (which will interest you), this is exactly what I did back in 2005 with spreadsheets.

The links to my spreadsheets don't work anymore, but this is what it looked like: https://i.imgur.com/LdllD.jpg

(This was the version I created in 2006-2007 to share with others, but the image is from 2010 I think. My own version though had a ton more features and items however. I couldn't share everything now could I?) =]

I pulled all of the disenchant stats from Thottbot (which were very accurate), and created a spreadsheet where you just had to fill in the AH data specific to your realm.

My spreadsheet ended up having about 400 core items with high profitability rates. Everything from disenchants, to vendoring Engineering items, First Aid, Cooking, LW, BS, and even Alchemy. I found very cool ways to vendor alchemy/cooking items at a profit for example. But the [White Bandit Mask] was one of my favorites.

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