NotCliche

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1. VMLM3 on July 3rd, 2009 at 9:26 PM

   aaaaaahahahahaha

   The SC2 desing team at blizzard just owned itself xD. This is a an epic-fail decision.
   Basically you’re saying two things:
   Players can’t spawn off a single cd to play together.
   You must have an internet connection to play this game.

   So what does that mean? On the first count, it means you can’t take your cd to a lan party, install the game on multiple machines and play with a group of your friends. Now I know you’re against piracy, BUT THAT’S NOT PIRACY. Infact it’s the single most beneficial thing that ever happened to Starcraft. This is a competetive multiplayer game we’re talking about, the best source of marketing it’ll ever have is letting players experience the game for themselves. You think everybody in Korea had a copy or starcraft to begin with? Hell no there where probably a handful of SC CDs compared to the millions of kids who where actually playing the game. But it made the game popular, heck it’s part of their culture now. Monopolizing the game’s multiplayer aspect like this is just overkill and it limits the games capacity to spread naturally thus creating a player base.
   On the second count it means one of two things: If you don’t have an internet connection you can’t play the game outright, and if you don’t have a stable connection your mulitplayer experience will be drastically limited. This basically means nobody in a third world country will play your game. Now you might think “Hell they just pirate the game anyway, most sales are in the US and Europe”. News flash: half the world is a third world country xD. Been on battlenet lately? Seen the battlenet clones? Yeah… nobody’s actually done the math yet apparently, but most of the market for Blizzard’s RTSs ISN’T in the US and Europe. In fact I’d be willing to bet a fairly large chunk of it is in Asia and Central/South America. The pattern with starcraft has always been:
   want to play starcraft? ask your friend for a copy and try it out.
   Like it and want to play on battlenet, take advantage of patches and official content? buy the game.
   Want to play the game competitively and/or host tournaments? buy the game.

   So as a summary, what I feel Blizzard’s inadvertently doing here is:
   Limiting it’s game’s ability to spread through the population naturally (through player interaction, recommendation and word of mouth), thus creating a player base and allowing it to be absorbed into gaming culture. Basically you’re raising the entrance threshold. Originally the only thing people had to do to play the game was have a friend lend it to them, now they have to fork over $50 BEFORE they even know how good the product is in order to start playing.

   Shutting out the multiplayer experience to anyone who has a shaky internet connection. That’s half the asian and all the south american population right down the drain right there.

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2. Kiri on July 1st, 2009 at 2:46 AM

   What the hell, seriously? I can understand their piracy concerns, but come on. THEY ARE GOING TO DESTROY SOUTH KOREA’S GRAND SC ECONOMY! I’ve already considered that the original Starcraft would be favored by many over the new one, but this is really a blow.

   That said, I don’t think it would affect me all that much in the end.

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