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| [Aug 12, 2011, 11:03 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments |
The Armchair Empire - An Open Letter to Mike Morhaime.
Ubisoft may have set the precedent, but there is a rather different set of factors involved with Diablo III. The most obvious is that the community was not strictly locked into the PC as the platform for titles like Assassin's Creed II, and public comments in the past from Yves Guillemot and other executives at Ubisoft have expressed a strong desire to divest of themselves of any presence in the PC market. Blizzard does not have that degree of flexibility. The days of The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne are long gone. The PC is the only platform you have invested in, whether that's Windows or Mac, and there is no other place to go. For better or worse, you've tied yourself to a single platform, and forcing this scheme onto the community without the benefit of alternate platforms will not result in millions of fans falling in line like good little sheep to be fleeced. You may get some, but nowhere near what you were expecting. The rest will either forsake the game, and Blizzard by extension, or they will turn pirate.
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Re: Op Ed |
Aug 12, 2011, 11:51 |
Dirwulf |
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Verno wrote on Aug 12, 2011, 11:33:
Because the code that actually runs the game will not be available, it would take the creation and distribution of something like an MMO free server in order to play the game offline, and for a fast paced game with complex mechanics, I doubt you're going to see that pulled off anytime soon.
People reverse engineered most of the functionality of the old battle.net, it's certainly possible albeit time consuming. What's more difficult is going to be figuring out character file formats as Blizzard will almost certainly obfuscate that to hell and back. It'll have to come after the former too.
And they got sued and lost and Blizzard took over their domain, although its allegedly being used in other countries. I don't know why you'd want to waste you time, though, except maybe as an exercise or learning experience. Blizzard WILL shut you down, if they can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
Also, I think this open letter is pretty pretentious. Its not like Mike hasn't been doing this for 20 years. I would say he knows what he is doing, and after all the dust settles, nothing is going to change from all the complaints. This has been planned for a very long time, and they are not going to reverse this decision.
Also, I will once again point out that the number of people complaining are, unfortunately, in the minority. Most of the people who will be buying D3, won't know, or won't care about the always on connection. Most of the people who play Blizzard games are used to this by now anyway, even with the offline mode of SC2.
This is going to be the future of gaming. I don't necessarily like it, but this is where everyone is going to go. Its just a fact. You, as a gamer, may not like it, but it makes business sense in the end. Even with the "lost" sales. Corporations don't live in your reality. They live in red and black.
Also, Bridenbecker already said this had nothing to do with piracy. I'll let you decide if you want to believe that or not.
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/08/blizzard-surpri.php
This comment was edited on Aug 12, 2011, 12:01. |
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