A business point of view.

First of all, I have a business background. I would like to state the differences between INDIE developers and MAJOR developers.

This applies to the entire entertainment industry, film/music and games.

Major labels and production companies have billions of dollars of capital and access to more resources than most people can dream of their entire lives.

Indie companies usually have access to little or no resources, no capital to begin with or small investors, the success of an indie company depends entirely on the success of their initial product, if this fails the company has usually spent all of their capital developing said product and instantly goes into administration/liquidation or vulture buyouts.

Diablo 3 is supported by Blizzard Entertainment and Activision, both of which are now majority owned by Vivendi SA. This means that both of these companies have access to the best game designers and developers on the planet, billions of dollars worth of resources and all the time in the world to produce a game, hence Diablo 3 taking over 8 years to produce so far.

Path of Exile has ONE financial investor and has just opened a donation shop, accepting donation packages starting at $10 and ranging to $1000. The reason for this by now I'm sure is pretty damn self explanatory. If PoE fails, Grinding Gear Games, a small New Zealand based Indie games company. It's run by four people. They are accepting donations because the ONE financial investor they had obviously cannot support the game for an extended period of time prior to release, hence needing funds to keep the production going. Also, PoE is now being released in an open beta state, being unfinished and all final features being developed with the community.

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Now, the point. How the hell can you even begin to compare these two games? It's all I seem to be reading about, on both the PoE forums and Diablo 3 forums, in-game and out of game, on here and on facebook as well.

You're comparing a company that quite literally will be blown out of the water by Blizzard entertainment.

I LOVE Path of Exile, adore it in every way. In my own opinion I feel it grabs the depth that the original diablo had and also gives Diablo 3 a run for it's money in many way's however this is still beside the point.

PoE has 7400 people currently, roughly 3-4% of those people will make a $1000 dollar donation, around 60% of that base will pay $10-50. The rest will be willing to cash out between 100-250 or 500 dollars in donations. (you'd be surprised how much money people throw around)

Blizzard has a player base in the region of 20-22 million players world wide. On May the 15th, Blizzard will make more money in a day than path of exile will make in a year.

Their's no comparison and never will be. I think PoE will have huge success but, I also think they will be bought out within a year of release and become part of a major games company. Runic Entertainment is a perfect example of such.

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This is an analysis from a neutral business perspective. It doesn't matter whether the game is entertaining or not.

I honestly think, we really need to stop comparing the damn things and just play them.. Path of Exile is a fantastic game, as is Diablo 3.

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Lioncash wrote:

I think PoE will have huge success but, I also think they will be bought out within a year of release and become part of a major games company. Runic Entertainment is a perfect example of such.

This is the only part I dont really agree with. I'm not so sure about a buyout.

They better not be bloody bought out.

Honestly if you make a quality game, like you have, people will come.

A lot of people are sick and tired of shallow half assed console ports.

We want some depth and complexity in our games, we want games made for the PC and we will pay for it.

Just look at kickstarter.

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Lioncash wrote:

First of all, I have a business background.

For someone with a business background, you sure got a lot of things wrong in your original post.

I hope you don't hold business meetings the same way you post, lmao.

Unless of course you're one of those shady pyramid scheme type of businessmen :)

I'm guessing he got the number of people from the limit for the servers currently. However the press release gave a number of 13,000 for people that donated, some of them already had access.

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Epicurwin wrote:

I'm guessing he got the number of people from the limit for the servers currently. However the press release gave a number of 13,000 for people that donated, some of them already had access.

The number which he supplied was very close to the max concurrent users given in the press release.

Yer just gotta viral, and viral hard.

Viral on Reddit, on 4chan, wherever else with tons of people who play video games. Let them at least know that PoE exists. The net number of people who even know about this game is and will be the financial bottleneck of GGG, and the only realistic way of resolving it without multi-million-dollar ad campaigns is by viralling.

"

I LOVE Path of Exile, adore it in every way. In my own opinion I feel it grabs the depth that the original diablo had and also gives Diablo 3 a run for it's money in many way's however this is still beside the point.

This isn't beside the point, this is the point.

The debate in comparing the two games hasn't been over who will garner the most money, it's been over who is producing the better ARPG and who has lived up to the Diablo legacy the best. In my book PoE is winning on both fronts. Sales do not equal better product.