Even so I think there easily would've been a Diablo II even if there was no cheating in Diablo.John Phillips / Getty ImagesJeremy Bulloch, the original actor behind the role of famed Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett, has passed away at the age of 75, his family confirmed via a Facebook post. But I do think the cheating gave the multiplayer an unknown quantity that improved replayability and perhaps made it culturally memorable (it seems a lot of people remember the "duping" in here especially). In short I don't think people were buying the game based on the cheating aspect.
I'd also play the hell out of games I bought, partly because I had a longer attention span back then (I think we all did) but also because I'd rarely buy a new game, and we weren't exactly drowning in amazing PC games - there were no Steam backlogs back then calling out to you to pick up a new game the moment you got bored. Or talk to my friends and see what they've been playing. to research games to buy - I'd buy a game based off the box art/marketing, or occasionally I'd buy a PC gaming magazine and see what they reviewed. It's not like there was social media chatter about how you had to check out this game with all the cheating and whatnot (maybe people did that on Usenet or something but I wasn't savvy enough to know about Usenet, and I'd argue the majority of new internet users coming online in the mid-late 90s weren't either). PC gaming was very different 20+ years ago. So I think it still would've had an impact, especially with the interactive story, the unique controls/method of play, and the good graphics and overall polish (including the prerendered scenes). But still, the game had a very compelling single player (which was more important in those days), and I played plenty of multiplayer with people who weren't cheating and it was still fun. I don't think I would've gotten super deep into the dungeons without the help of some cheaters guiding me and dropping duped powerful items, so that was fun.
I think a much more convincing argument can be made that the shareware business evolved into the F2P nonsense we have now - it’s like shareware but without the hurdle of extracting money by a traditional up front price that better fits, rightly or wrongly, the current consumer expectations of software pricing. Commander Keen never had to worry himself with online cheat patches.
With the extensive support tail modern software typically has (no more ship it and it’s done really, especially with network features.) the large number of players who would never upgrade to the paid version would still be a significant expense to support in many cases too. There are thousands upon thousands of indie releases every year now, compared to the relatively trickle we got in the peak shareware days. Shareware arguably just doesn’t work all that well either in such a crowded modern gaming marketplace. Now with widespread internet access shareware as physical distribution just doesn’t matter anymore, and we have a wealth of ways to determine if a game will be something you like - countless review sites, YouTube, Reddit, etc, etc. This organic sharing process was critical to the shareware model at that time in an age when few household computers were connected to a network of any kind.
If you liked the game enough you often phoned the company to get the full game. Remember that with shareware, distribution was often literal “sharing” of physical copies - almost all shareware I played came from clones of friend’s 3.5inch floppies. As a relatively ancient gamer with fond memories of shareware, I think it was the right solution for that time, but the time has passed.