Legal Opinion: How Cloud Gaming Turned Piracy Into Espionage

[PalZer0]

people still arguing over semantics = fail.

D3 is not a single player game. Blizzard have made it a community based multiplayer game whether you like it or not. To play the game you need access to the community, which requires a network connection, regardless of your wish to play solo or with others. get it through your skulls and things will make much more sense.

If you dont like the fact that Blizzard have developed the game this way in an effort to consolidate and secure the community and its economy then dont buy it, but stop whinging about it because its not going to change, your just pissing into the wind.

This further proves my case for renaming the game Diablo Online. There'd be far less whinging because it would be clear from the game's title what Blizzard is trying to do.

Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201

[Marius]

Only a vocal minority are really whining about it.

This thread has been driven by mostly the same few people.

Blizzard shouldn't have to rewrite their game code and change their marketing to satisfy maybe 5% of the player base.

That's really what it comes down to. Making the game stronger for the majority. You can disagree with this approach, but it makes sense from both a business and overall game quality perspective. No amount of bleeding hearts over people with no net will convince Blizzard to weaken the game to accommodate them.

And yes, including various offline options for the vocal minority would weaken the game, by making it less secure, making a potentially confusing product, reducing investor confidence (and therefore development money) due to fears of piracy etc. That last one is potentially huge, since investor decisions are mostly driven by confidence.

[exe3]

So is the vocal minority those wanting the singleplayer offline mode or those wanting the permanent online multiplayer mode?

You're coming up with these 'facts' that 95% of people want all these mp options when you have no evidence to prove it, in truth for all you know you're the vocal minority. It'll be really interesting if Blizzard actually store and release any statistics that tell us exactly how many people completely ignore the mp side of the game and only play the sp thus voiding every last thing they've ever said in defense of making it online only.

/edit

Or perhaps we're both the vocal minority and 99% of people just don't give a sh!t and will play how they want to play regardless of anything else.

[Marius]

The facts are that pre-orders are extremely high, and Blizzard already has a captive market they're upselling the game to in terms of SC2 and WoW players, the majority of which have net connections and play multiplayer often.

Blizzard isn't selling the game to the Skyrim crowd.

[exe3]

No, they're selling it to the Diablo crowd who would buy it regardless. The real question as i've said is how many people end up actually playing the mp part. If very few, or if more overall hours are spent in sp than in mp then every last thing Blizzard has said about coop has been a lie because the vast majority were playing the sp despite these mp options they spent so much time working on (and I dare say justifying their DRM on).

[Marius]

They formed their sales strategy around selling to a twelve year old market that was a lot smaller than their current total fanbase and doesn't have many of the new players that have come in since?

[exe3]

What are you talking about? The Diablo series has sold millions and millions of copies and continues to sell units to this day.

[Marius]

Not as big as Starcraft, WoW, and Diablo all combined though.

Blizzard is building an online BattleNet empire, where ideally, every customer owns every single game.

I'd be very surprised if they make a single-player focused game ever again. Even the SC2 single player campaign was ultra short compared to SC1, and hardly the focus compared to online competition.

Blizzard, effectively, wants all its customers online, wants them all on Battlenet, and wants to sell every single game they make to each of them.

[exe3]

Not as big as Starcraft, WoW, and Diablo all combined though.

Blizzard is building an online BattleNet empire, where ideally, every customer owns every single game.

Is this what you think they're doing or a stated goal of theirs? If a stated goal i'm honestly shocked as as a developer of multiple genres they should know better than most that not everyone likes every genre so having the goal that every customer owns every game is unfeasible. You will naturally get a lot of overlap sure but it shouldn't be an outright goal.

I'd be very surprised if they make a single-player focused game ever again. Even the SC2 single player campaign was ultra short compared to SC1, and hardly the focus compared to online competition.

The difference between SC and Diablo is that SC has a very long history of that online competition. Also it still had that sp campaign regardless of whether it was significantly shorter (I didn't think so, but maybe it was shorter if you skipped all the filler missions).

Blizzard, effectively, wants all its customers online, wants them all on Battlenet, and wants to sell every single game they make to each of them.

I don't disagree with this, the disagreement is on why. I view it, like some others as a move for DRM first, gameplay second. They have opened themselves up something new with gameplay by forcing everyone online and they're trying to expand that as much as possible but the decision was no doubt originally a DRM decision first and foremost and it sets extremely dangerous precedent for the future. As I said previously, games officially have lifetimes now.

Also if they made a new IP that very much was this online only game that needed that online to create its experience (ala MMO's, hell it could've just been an MMO with a top down view and action RPG gameplay) then there'd be no issue. This issue is that they're taking an existing sp series and forcing it online for DRM purposes and then expanding the coop component to try and justify the DRM on gameplay grounds despite the fact that a lot of people only want to play the sp anyway.

[jerichosainte]

No, they're selling it to the Diablo crowd who would buy it regardless. The real question as i've said is how many people end up actually playing the mp part. If very few, or if more overall hours are spent in sp than in mp then every last thing Blizzard has said about coop has been a lie because the vast majority were playing the sp despite these mp options they spent so much time working on (and I dare say justifying their DRM on).

Lets not make statements based on assumption. All the people I know who played the beta played with friends one reason being it scales the enemies depending on how many people are playing at once, meaning better loot drops (every person playing gets individual loot drops so there is no fighting over who gets what).

I wasn't 100% on purchasing Diablo until I played the beta. It really is a great game and the online is seamless.

I look at it like this...

Pros
1 - Online cloud storage of your hero's and progress
2 - Ability to play on own, allow others to join your quest or join someone else's quest.
3 - Secure online environment.
4 - Ability to trade items, without having to go through a dodgy third party.
5 - Fair progression on all players i.e no hacks

Cons
1 - Need internet to play.

Get over it people, if you don't like the idea of not being able play the game .05% of the time (personally after 10 years of ADSL use I haven't had a single outage) or you don't like the idea of scheduled maintenance then either (A) don't buy the game or (B) take up some extracurricular activities for the downtime.

IMO once people are balls deep in this game I don't think it will matter.

[Nekosan]

TBH my friends and I got the most play out of Mods for Diablo 2 rather than anything else, bossmods etc got an extra few years out of the game for us, I'm not particularly confident they'll allow that kind of stuff any more though because of the auctionhouse.

[Marius]

Is this what you think they're doing or a stated goal of theirs? If a stated goal i'm honestly shocked as as a developer of multiple genres they should know better than most that not everyone likes every genre so having the goal that every customer owns every game is unfeasible. You will naturally get a lot of overlap sure but it shouldn't be an outright goal.

Not stated, but it's kinda obvious.

1. Diablo 3 is offered free to WoW players in return for an annual sub.
2. You couldn't get into the D3 beta without another Blizzard product.
3. D3 shows your BattleTag in game, not your character name, and the BattleTag is across every Blizzard game.
4. There's a huge crossover between different games, including the upcoming BlizzardDota.
5. The art style across all Blizzard games is exactly the same. When you buy one Blizzard game, you buy into the same aesthetics as all of them.

And 6... every business has an ideal customer. The best market to these customers, and these only. I'd be very, very surprised if the top marketing talent at Blizzard was ignoring this. While a business can have multiple ideal customers, it's not as efficient if you can just sell everything to one. In this case, people who like online-only games are the logical ideal customer.

[jerichosainte]

Also if they made a new IP that very much was this online only game that needed that online to create its experience (ala MMO's, hell it could've just been an MMO with a top down view and action RPG gameplay) then there'd be no issue. This issue is that they're taking an existing sp series and forcing it online for DRM purposes and then expanding the coop component to try and justify the DRM on gameplay grounds despite the fact that a lot of people only want to play the sp anyway.

I don't think the reasoning is 100% based on DRM. Looking back at D2 some people got burnt having to deal with a third party to purchase in game items. Blizzard saw a need and wanted to fulfil that with a secure way to trade items and fairer game play. Answer to that is online only to make it fair on every user.

Some people say "they have added the auction house to take a cut from trades, they just want to make more money" and that is fair enough gripe on the surface but this doesn't really take anything away from the Diablo experience, its actually adding value to the game for most players. Any auction site like ebay charges a fee to sell items, why wouldn't blizzard charge to provide this ongoing service? Again don't want to use it? You don't have to!

I think Blizzard have the player in mind more so than other developers. Let's not burn them at the stake for making a great game that just needs internet to play and enjoy the fruits of their labour for the last 10(at least) years.

[jerichosainte]

TBH my friends and I got the most play out of Mods for Diablo 2 rather than anything else, bossmods etc got an extra few years out of the game for us, I'm not particularly confident they'll allow that kind of stuff any more though because of the auctionhouse.

No they won't, but then they were never keen on people modding the previous games anyway. The difficulty modes though not as diverse as mods can be will keep players moving though, Inferno looks good.

[Shuth]

This further proves my case for renaming the game Diablo Online. There'd be far less whinging because it would be clear from the game's title what Blizzard is trying to do.

It's called Diablo 3. It's the next installment in the series. It's already pretty clear from the game title what we're getting. Just because it's not what YOU want doesn't make it untrue.

No, they're selling it to the Diablo crowd who would buy it regardless. The real question as i've said is how many people end up actually playing the mp part.

100% of players will be playing the multiplayer component. There is next to no distinction between playing by yourself or with others apart from the slight difficulty increase as more people join. You start the game and can play with 1-4 people. If you choose to not include the other 3 players, the game is still online/multiplayer capable - your friends can join mid-way through.

I need a merry-go-round smiley... perfect for these threads.