I'm sorry if there is a topic on this somewhere; I didn't see one after doing a search.
Anyway, for those who haven't heard yet, Blizzard recently made two big announcements that have shaken the faith of even their most loyal fans. First is Blizzard's decision to split StarCraft II into three games. Not expansions, mind you. Rather, they are splitting the game into three. The first game covers the Terran campaign, the second covers the Zerg campaign, and the third covers the Protoss campaign. Blizzard claims that they had to do this because each campaign is "longer than the ones in past StarCraft games." Not only that, but each one will be priced as a full game, not as individual expansions, meaning that fans will now have to pay $150 plus tax for the StarCraft II experience instead of just $50.
Secondly, Blizzard is considering the concept of charging for Battle.net, a service that they have offered in all their games for free since 1997. This is something many fans find even more disturbing because it shows that Blizzard is becoming more greedy after the merger with Activision. The service was free even before Blizzard was the juggernaut that they are now; you can't tell me they can't afford to keep it that way. It seems as though Blizzard is looking at their profits from WoW and saying "Huh...Imagine how much we can make off the Battle.net users! There are MILLIONS of them!"
Secondly, Blizzard is considering the concept of charging for Battle.net, a service that they have offered in all their games for free since 1997. This is something many fans find even more disturbing because it shows that Blizzard is becoming more greedy after the merger with Activision. The service was free even before Blizzard was the juggernaut that they are now; you can't tell me they can't afford to keep it that way. It seems as though Blizzard is looking at their profits from WoW and saying "Huh...Imagine how much we can make off the Battle.net users! There are MILLIONS of them!"
Thoughts? Opinions?
I wanna see a link and until that i am calling bs on it
Secondly, Blizzard is considering the concept of charging for Battle.net, a service that they have offered in all their games for free since 1997. This is something many fans find even more disturbing because it shows that Blizzard is becoming more greedy after the merger with Activision. The service was free even before Blizzard was the juggernaut that they are now; you can't tell me they can't afford to keep it that way. It seems as though Blizzard is looking at their profits from WoW and saying "Huh...Imagine how much we can make off the Battle.net users! There are MILLIONS of them!"
Thoughts? Opinions?
I wanna see a link and until that i am calling bs on it
I don't like the Episodic releases of SC, but I can put up with that. The fact that they want to charge for Battle.net, instead of making a World of Starcraft, is annoying, but I expect greed from every company, so it doesn't surprise me.
The three games thing pissed me off. Feels like I'm being blackmailed. Still want the game though. But if they try to force me into paying for battle.net then that's it. I'm not gonna be buying the game, or any games from blizzard ever.
wow splitting SCII into the three campaigns is a dick move. Although they will get away with it. blizzard fanboys will still shell it out, and well lets face it I might even do that. Although it's a really horrible thing to do. Charge a hundred and keep it together as one game.
The battle.net thing doesnt suprise me, although it is not a concern of mine, I never really used it. However it is worce than the SCII announcment. Charging money for a service that you ran for a decade for free without losing money. I hope someone like a god punishes blizzard for this.
They said MONETIZE, not that it would be subscription based. Wait until they give specifics before you get out the torches and pitchforks. The SCII issue has been discussed several times.
Remember, they're a business- financial crisis, rising cost of production, anyone? Yeah, I guess you all forgot. Anyway save me a spot in the angry mob, i'll join you when there's confirmation that battlenet will be pay per month or whatever.
Hhmmm... You can bet that there will be a collector's edition which will only cost you your eternal soul in exchange for all the three "episodes". Meh, just means that I'll only buy the Protoss one, but if you for example need to have the terran episode to play Terran skirmish/online I'm going to start a crusade against Blizzard...
TsunamiWombat: They said MONETIZE, not that it would be subscription based. Wait until they give specifics before you get out the torches and pitchforks. The SCII issue has been discussed several times.
Same damn thing though...It is just the fact that they have been offering the service for a decade for free, yet now suddenly want to make us pay money for it/special features? Blizzard honestly has no reason to charge money beyond greed getting the better of them. They can afford to keep the service free; they were doing so even before WoW made them as rich as God.
Jolly Madness: Hhmmm... You can bet that there will be a collector's edition which will only cost you your eternal soul in exchange for all the three "episodes". Meh, just means that I'll only buy the Protoss one, but if you for example need to have the terran episode to play Terran skirmish/online I'm going to start a crusade against Blizzard...
Damn... I was planning to buy SC2, but this dick move is making me reconsider that... Hell, I'm already certain that I won't buy it. As if it isn't enough to pay 60 euros for a game, we'll now need to pay 180 to get the full experience.
TsunamiWombat: Remember, they're a business- financial crisis, rising cost of production, anyone? Yeah, I guess you all forgot. Anyway save me a spot in the angry mob, i'll join you when there's confirmation that battlenet will be pay per month or whatever.
With the amount of money they pull in from World of Warcraft, I find it kind of hard to believe that Blizzard can't spend a bit of money to make Battle.net completely free.
They did it in the past when they didn't have a giant like WoW. Now they do have a giant cash cow like WoW and suddenly they can't do it anymore? I'm calling bullshit.
The way it's looking, Blizzard just isn't the same company anymore. Whether it was from merging with Activision or seeing all the money they made through WoW, Blizzard has become a money grubbing whore.
I must sound like a broken record, but I want to know about the pricing strategy for Star Craft 2. I know that Diablo 3 will kick ass and Battlenet is still free. So what is to worry about that? WoW can burn in gamers hell for all I care. So for me it is Star Craft 2 or BUST!!!
The way it's looking, Blizzard just isn't the same company anymore. Whether it was from merging with Activision or seeing all the money they made through WoW, Blizzard has become a money grubbing whore.
It is Activison. They have perverted the Blizzard spirit to be money whores. :(
Alleged_Alec: Damn... I was planning to buy SC2, but this dick move is making me reconsider that... Hell, I'm already certain that I won't buy it. As if it isn't enough to pay 60 euros for a game, we'll now need to pay 180 to get the full experience.
We don't know anything yet. The time to be disappointed is when they say "Yep, ever single section of Star Craft 23 will be $60!!".
Ugh. I was a huge Blizzard fan, but if they charge for Battlenet I'm not going to be buying any more of their games, or I'll just play the single-player missions only.
And SC into three games? What, are the campaigns more than 60 hours long each? :/
I hate to say so, but I fucking called it. I've been saying for forever that Blizzard was gonna start pulling the same shit they pulled with WoW with their other franchises. I only hope it fails so that the rest of the games industry dos'nt follow suit.
Wow, that is criminal. But at the same time, it seems kind of cool that you get a game devoted strictly to the Zerg! Also, I had forgoten about Starcraft 2 anyways since hearing about Diablo 3.
Although they haven't announced a price point for each SC2 game, it's logical to conclude they'll each cost full price. As someone stated, it seems like a slap in the face and a dick move by Blizzard. They say it's to make the game more epic, at the same time exactly how do you make a RTS game "Epic?"
A lot of cut-scenes, sorry welcome to 2008, I can Youtube them all. Long game play, which usually ends up just being delays or busy-work and not actual interesting content.
For me, Blizzard has a lot of work to do to convince people Starcraft 2 is worth the price of three games. I'll wait for reviews and first-hand impressions of the Terran compaign before I put any money down on it or any of the following games, but if it's a, "You get your money's worth" type of case it's justified. (This is new territory and change Blizzard is going into, they need to prove it to their customer's)
I thought Battlenet was going to be free still. Is it going to cost cash? because if it does I am pissed beyond pissed. And South Korea will make war with just Blizzard. As in the WHOLE country. They love their Star Craft.
Altherix: Although they haven't announced a price point for each SC2 game, it's logical to conclude they'll each cost full price. As someone stated, it seems like a slap in the face and a dick move by Blizzard. They say it's to make the game more epic, at the same time exactly how do you make a RTS game "Epic?"
A lot of cut-scenes, sorry welcome to 2008, I can Youtube them all. Long game play, which usually ends up just being delays or busy-work and not actual interesting content.
For me, Blizzard has a lot of work to do to convince people Starcraft 2 is worth the price of three games. I'll wait for reviews and first-hand impressions of the Terran compaign before I put any money down on it or any of the following games, but if it's a, "You get your money's worth" type of case it's justified. (This is new territory and change Blizzard is going into, they need to prove it to their customer's)
Blizzard on Battle.net Subscription, Diablo 3 Modding by Nick Breckon Oct 10, 2008 7:58pm CST tags: Diablo 3 Diablo III director Jay Wilson said today that the company does not have a great desire to charge a subscription fee for the upcoming revision of its multiplayer client Battle.net. However, the developer did note that Blizzard will likely monetize unknown features of the game.
"We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to."
Wilson noted that whatever the content would be, it would have an appropriate value to users.
Fans of map hacking and other Diablo II modifications have little to look forward to with the sequel, as Wilson shot down any talk of mod support.
"We don't have a lot of plans to do that. It would make our lives so much harder" he said, adding that despite the fact that he and many other designers got their start in modding, the team takes a strong stance on the hacking of their games.
Wilson also used the panel to reemphasize the trading aspect of Diablo III, saying that no items outside of specific quest rewards will be bound to players.
GameSpy: The big buzz yesterday was the StarCraft II news, that it would be released as a trilogy, with the first release focusing on the Terran campaign with follow-ups centering on the other races. Can you talk about how that decision came about? Frank Pearce: Typically, for a product like StarCraft II, we anticipate that we'll want to do an expansion set. So we knew that was something we were interested in. We talked about the possibility of doing a second expansion set, which would be new for us, with the exception of World of Warcraft.
We were working on the single-player campaign, the story behind it, the lore behind it, and one of the factors was that we didn't feel like we could go into the amount of depth with the storyline that we wanted to if we tried to cram it all into one game. And we knew that we needed to be able to continue the storyline in an expansion set, and possibly two expansion sets, and it just seemed to be a good fit to say, let's just make the decision now that we're going to do a couple of expansion sets, and we can spread the storyline over the initial product and the expansion sets and really go into the depth and the story that we want to go into.
According to Dustin Browder, StarCraft II's design team never intended to break the game up into three separate parts. "This decision was all about trying to get enough choices and options into the game," Browder said as we began our discussion about the "trilogy." "We got to a really bad place in developing the campaign where the story had become too big. There were too many things we wanted to do, too many characters we felt needed to be in there and 25 or 30 missions we'd need to provide enough variety."
More importantly in the decision making process, according to Browder, was the sinking feeling the development team got when they started cutting campaign features to squeeze the whole thing into one product. "We didn't want to tread water with this game and just give the fans something slightly better than Warcraft III. It felt like we were going backwards.
Wings of Liberty, the game's first campaign, will be shipping with a full and complete multiplayer suite with all three races available. The subsequent titles will add campaigns for the Zerg and Protoss races and both will carry additions for the multiplayer portion. While no price point has been set yet, Browder stated that if the follow-up games feel like full-featured games, they'll be priced accordingly. If they don't they'll probably be priced around the average expansion pack price. "We usually don't think about price points until we're relatively close to shipping," Browder said. Whatever the price is, though, we want the fans to feel like they've gotten their money's worth."
The article goes on to talk about goodies that will be availible in singleplayer that won't be in multiplayer, such as units and upgrades.
We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to."
What kinds of features I wonder? And how much?
Wings of Liberty, the game's first campaign, will be shipping with a full and complete multiplayer suite with all three races available. The subsequent titles will add campaigns for the Zerg and Protoss races and both will carry additions for the multiplayer portion.
Well that answers that question. Protoss FTW!
While no price point has been set yet, Browder stated that if the follow-up games feel like full-featured games, they'll be priced accordingly. If they don't they'll probably be priced around the average expansion pack price. "We usually don't think about price points until we're relatively close to shipping," Browder said. Whatever the price is, though, we want the fans to feel like they've gotten their money's worth."
So then we are going to pay around $150-%180 for the whole Starcraft experience. Thi
I'm sorry if there is a topic on this somewhere; I didn't see one after doing a search.
Anyway, for those who haven't heard yet, Blizzard recently made two big announcements that have shaken the faith of even their most loyal fans. First is Blizzard's decision to split StarCraft II into three games. Not expansions, mind you. Rather, they are splitting the game into three. The first game covers the Terran campaign, the second covers the Zerg campaign, and the third covers the Protoss campaign. Blizzard claims that they had to do this because each campaign is "longer than the ones in past StarCraft games." Not only that, but each one will be priced as a full game, not as individual expansions, meaning that fans will now have to pay $150 plus tax for the StarCraft II experience instead of just $50.
Secondly, Blizzard is considering the concept of charging for Battle.net, a service that they have offered in all their games for free since 1997. This is something many fans find even more disturbing because it shows that Blizzard is becoming more greedy after the merger with Activision. The service was free even before Blizzard was the juggernaut that they are now; you can't tell me they can't afford to keep it that way. It seems as though Blizzard is looking at their profits from WoW and saying "Huh...Imagine how much we can make off the Battle.net users! There are MILLIONS of them!"
Thoughts? Opinions?