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 Blizzard Quote: (Source) |
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| what I will say is that a player who goes to retail and buys the Starcraft 2 box at retail will have the full Starcraft 2 game included in the box and they will have the ability to play on battlenet with no additional fee. | ||
If they do monetize it, it will be the last time I buy anything from Blizzard. I'll pirate the game to hell and back, and curse them and their families for countless generations!
I hope it remains free - they still win money from game sales ... and it’s gonna be a trilogy so ... I don’t think any payed service is justified!
It will be much less of a success if it's paid to play. No one in their right minds will pay a monthly fee to play a RTS game. As much as I like the StarCraft series, I think I would rather stick with WoW if Bnet 2.0 happens to be a monthly service. I expect bi-monthly new content for SC2 if it's a monthly subscription.
I agree with Schizo that a monthly subscription is only justified if you get regular content updates, else it would be payments for server maintenance. While bnet has more features other RTS offer this also without a subscription. Extra content will be delivered by the trilogy and the patches for balance issues are also nothing special. The comment from medievaldragon, that it could be for esports is however a more likely notion, but could someone please elaborate on what "esports" includes? Is ladderbased play also a part of esports? Or is this only professional games with commentary?
I think the article means pay-to-play on a separate pro-gaming/E-sports ladder on BNet. Similar to the the arena tournament servers on WoW (yes, you pay a little more to play on that - one time fee) and the one on War3. Forgot what that one was called. But if it's anything like Hellgate (free to play, but if you pay, you get more out of the game) it'll be major deterrent of the game. Look at what happened to Hellgate earlier this year...
“...a player who goes to retail and buys the StarCraft 2 box, at retail, will have the full StarCraft game included in the box and they will have the ability to play on Battle.net with no additional fees.”
http://www.cilution.net/mike5-31.wav
from here http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=94434¤tpage=2
Interesting. So that leaves eSports as a venue to monetize upon. Another possibility could be monetizing it in China. Use the World of Warcraft model in China as reference. People plays in CyberCafes and pay per time.
So that many people who plays games from these locations are not exactly paying for the ““RETAIL”” box.
The question is are they going to pay for cybercafe time + battle.net, or is the cybercafe responsible for paying Blizzard?
Thank goodness that rumor has finally been officially shattered. Thanks DXXX for posting that WAV URL link. It would suck if we had to pay to use battle.net 2.0 to play against our friends. If I want to pay a monthly fee, I’ll go and try out WoW. Starcraft 2 is off-limits to a monthly subscription. 
Another idea would be to put advertisement in Battle.net; that would be an interesting thing for advertisers since they would have a very precise target and a big guaranteed audience.
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If that happens they will lose me as a fanboy. I mean, I’ll still love SC and everything, but I’ll mutate into a Blizz hater :(