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Gwonam#5505 wrote:

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Kaboinglefop#0955 wrote:

GGG used to read this stuff.

Gaming evolved to pretty much rely completely on streamer culture as a huge bulk of income generation, so GGG will go hang out with streamers (who IMO are also not representative of us hardcore fans, but absolutely represent giant chunks of ready-to-spend-small-amount gamers)

So GGG won't listen to someone like me who has supported and played their games consistently for a long time, just like how Blizzard wouldn't listen to us D2 vets when we said runewords were a god damn mistake. Blizz came out with D3, GGG with PoE2, and on and on it goes.

Hardcore fans just don't matter anymore when it comes to live service games, the hobby of gaming is not made for us bar a few great one-off single player games.

The small impulse purchase gamers (minnows and dolphins) that you mention have actually been the pillar of GGG's income since the very beginning. I chatted with the GGG devs years ago, at a media tour for Ascendancy (almost a decade to the date, wow). The devs themselves told me that MMOs and live service games like PoE make most of their money on casual gamers who come back at the start of every league, drop some money on impulse purchases, then play for a few weeks and leave until the next league. Hardcore players keep the game afloat in between these boom periods, but those casual players are what keep the lights on, at the end of the day.