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.