The only thing AAA publishers and developers will learn from this is they'll look at the sales numbers from Baldur's Gate, then look at their profits from their psychologicaly fine tuned monitized games and come to the conclusion that the majority of gamers are suckers and will continue to bleed the gaming community dry as they clamour for the next CoD, FIFA, and Diablo.
"Instead of getting more accepting of microtransactions these days because they’ve become so normalized, I’m moving the opposite direction. I genuinely resent Diablo 4 for sinking so, so much work into its $15-30 armor sets in the store when they could have been farmable in the game, and in-game sets are already starting to fall behind in the seasonal model."
You clearly don't resent it that much, considering you gave Diablo 4 a 9/10.
It's not a burn; it's a poorly constructed comment made out of context. The author's criticism on Diablo 4 is based within the context of Baldur's Gate 3's release. The review for D4 was written before BG3 was released.
Hot take: mtx are a good thing as long as they don't cause a significant imbalance in gameplay. There's a reason the price of a AAA game has remained roughly $60 for nearly two decades in spite of increasing development costs and inflation.
People who purchase in game add-ons subsidize those who don't.
We also like games that ask players for feedback, then take it and test it in the game and improve the game with it if it works. As opposed to recycling the same ubisoft tower climbing + shallow collectible fetch quest-a-thon for the 100th time while wondering why people are getting bored and not buying the sequels.
I also love round based 5E DnD combat and bought BG after new campaigns for Solasta (Crown of the Magister) came to an end. Still a great game with huge 3rd party campaigns due to it's author toolkit/map maker.
If the success of Baldur's Gate 3 shows that gamers don't like micro-transactions, does that mean games that sell well with micro-transactions is prove that gamers actually like them?
Just want to be clear on what the rules are for the logic here.