Chapter 197: Why Did It Actually Succeed?
After the sales figures came out, industry insiders were all buzzing with discussion.
"Did you see that? *Diablo*'s sales have gone through the roof! First-month sales of 1.87 million units for a single-player game? That's just ridiculous!"
"Damn, 167 million in pure profit in one month? How? For this old-school third-person perspective relic?"
"I don't buy it either. I didn't find any obvious innovations in this game, and it's a single-player game at that. The gameplay isn't even as rich as an online game!"
"The problem is, player reviews are all really high!"
"Is it because of the game's quality?"
"Game quality is just the surface. If the game weren't fun, player reviews wouldn't be high either. But the issue now is that both sales and reviews are high!"
"Let's study it. There must be some trick here that we overlooked before."
Most designers were very confused.
Sure, Chen Mo had previously set an outrageous record with *Onmyoji*, pulling in 370 million in monthly revenue, but that wasn't really comparable to *Diablo*.
*Onmyoji* was head and shoulders above other mobile games in terms of visual quality, leaving them in the dust. It was also a major innovation in gameplay, pushing the characteristics of pay-to-win mobile games to their absolute limit.
With so many copycat pay-to-win mobile games paving the way beforehand, everyone was shocked by *Onmyoji*'s success, but they could still analyze it and sort of make sense of it.
But *Diablo* was different. Before it went on sale, basically no one was optimistic about it. Even Chen Mo's die-hard fans couldn't come up with a reason why the game would sell well. They just trusted Chen Mo unconditionally.
When the sales figures came out, these designers realized they had been wrong, and very wrong at that. There had to be some groundbreaking innovation in there that they just hadn't recognized.
...
While the designers were burying their heads in studying *Diablo*, a frenzy was also breaking out on major forums.
Lots of players who supported Chen Mo started digging up old posts, pulling out all the threads that had predicted *Diablo* would fail and roasting them.
"Time to eat your monitor, hurry up."
"And the ones who said they'd eat a USB drive, a mouse, a coffee cup—bon appétit."
"First-month sales of 1.87 million units. What did you guys say before? That it wouldn't exceed 800,000?"
"Sorry, as Chen Mo's fans, we can do whatever we want."
"Huh? The thread sank? Can't have that. Let's lift it up high."
"Lift it up high."
"Lift it up high."
"Lift it up high."
"Wow, you guys upstairs are so cruel. Digging up corpses? Count me in!"
...
On forums, in tieba communities, on Weibo trending topics—everywhere was full of content related to *Diablo*.
Moreover, two keywords simultaneously hit Weibo's hot search: one was "*Diablo*," and the other was "*Diablo* Sales Explosion."
This "grind, grind, grind" game had finally entered the sight of the vast majority of people, using its near-perfect first-month sales to force even the designers and players who had dismissed it to take it seriously.
...
At major companies like Imperial Dynasty Interactive and Zen Interactive, many RPG designers were holding meetings to study the reasons for *Diablo*'s success.
These were mainly A-level designers who had done deep research into both MMORPGs and single-player RPGs, and their grasp of storytelling was top-notch domestically.
After *Diablo*'s first-week sales came out, Yao Yu had already started playing it. By now, he had basically figured out the secrets of *Diablo*'s success.
Looking at the designers present, Yao Yu began his analysis.
"After digging deep into *Diablo*, I think there's one point we all overlooked before, and that's the 'sense of satisfaction.'"
"I don't know if you guys noticed, but in *Diablo*, players often face hundreds of monsters, especially in some key levels where the screen is just full of them. And when players wipe out these monsters in batches, accompanied by damage numbers filling the screen, flashy visual effects, and sound effects, that sense of satisfaction is far greater than what you get from most MMORPGs on the market right now."
The other designers nodded in agreement.
"Yeah, actually, this is pretty similar to the RPG maps in *Warcraft*. Simple and brainless, but very effective."
"The main issue is that most mainstream RPGs right now are online games. You have to consider all kinds of balance, and the numbers are pretty tightly constrained."
"So Chen Mo planned to make a single-player game from the start?"
"Meaning he had already figured it out from the beginning? That he wanted to make this kind of 'grind, grind, grind' game?"
Yao Yu continued, "It's not just that. I tried it out in *Sword Legend* and found that while you could create a similar feeling through number control, it was still far off from *Diablo*."
"I analyzed the reasons, and there are roughly three points."
"First, *Sword Legend* uses a lock-on targeting system, and many of its skills are single-target. If you want to highlight that satisfying feeling of grinding groups of monsters, you need to focus on non-lock-on skills."
"Second, the overall game atmosphere and environment in *Sword Legend* are relatively relaxed. The art style is bright, the monsters aren't scary, and grinding monsters for a while gets boring."
"Third, with *Sword Legend*'s first-person perspective, when the number of monsters reaches a certain level—say, over 100—the whole screen becomes a chaotic mess. Selecting targets and moving around become extremely difficult."
"Maybe VR mode would be a bit better, but VR mode introduces even more problems. One key issue is that this kind of grind-heavy game has to be single-player. Given *Diablo*'s development cost of 170 million, converting it to VR would cost at least over a billion. And with that kind of investment in a single-player VR game, how many companies are confident they can recoup their costs?"
The other designers looked at each other and finally reached a conclusion.
"So, if we want to make a game that gives players that satisfying feeling of grinding monsters, we have to change these three points?"
"Change the lock-on system to a non-lock-on system, change the art style to something darker, and change the first-person perspective to a third-person perspective?"
"Then... that's exactly what *Diablo* did?!"
"So... Chen Mo had it all planned out from the very beginning?!"