Blizzard on Battle.net Subscription, Diablo 3 Modding

not only do you have to buy SC2 3 times they're going to charge monthly for battle.net... bastards

"despite the fact that he and many other designers got their start in modding, the team takes a strong stance on what they call the "hacking" of their games."

Not that this paints him & the rest of his team as jackasses or anything...

"We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to."

I'm sure that the $1.2 Billion in subs fees can more than cover any of the support needed on the new B.Net considering that Wow in total only costs $200 Million. Leaving $800 million at least for the rest of the projects they are working on. Then there's the money they are going to make on SC:2 and Diablo when they come out.

Not going to knock capitalism but really ... The company practically prints money...

""We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to.""

I'm not going to overreact to this because I imgaine it s going to be for supplemental stuff and non recurring fees (basically they're going to move towards the micro-transaction/DLC model)

Still the whole 'we kind of have to' thing is pretty insulting.... how stupid do they think we are?

the blizzard anti-mod position is probably their worst. a lot of good things have come from modding.

some of the best games have been mods. some of the not-best games have been modded to be better. some old games have been patched by the community to help people play.

The more I think about it, while I completly understand not making this patricular game not moddable, it would be beyond awesome if they released a map/dungeon/campaign editor for it at some point down the line. The added value one would get by playing community-made campaigns/levels outside of the main campaign would be epic (as if the game didn't have enough replayability as it was! if diablo 2 is any indication, of course! (and im sure it is))

PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN BLIZZARD!! please please please!

Crazyness, pure crazyness... hmmm

Probably the paid things, will be places to host your videos / screenshots inside battle.net, and probably a special place to show your dead 1 life hardcore characters (characters with "hardcore" box checked at creation) , and yes, that needs money to mantain it.

wow, everyone needs to cry and complain some more. you think its free to run servers for such a huge population of people? QQ, get a job.

Former modders locking down their game, wagging their finger at would-be modders and vowing to "monetize" new features is ironic, not to mention slimy and arrogant.

Before the rise of the mogul publishers, gaming had a different spirit -- discovery, community, diversity of approach and variety of result. Guess you had to be there...

Christ, what a sad bunch of greedy corporate pricks now run things.

This is not world of warcraft and will not play as world of warcraft as stated in the video footage. Please understand this.

Next who cares how much money Blizzard makes? Is this going to impact ones gameplay? No.

As for battle.net as an anti piracy interface, what of it? One purchasing this game is contributing money towards this anti piracy interface and will then you will use it. They stated during live coverage that Diablo III will have no monthly fee for you to enjoy multiplayer or single player.

I do not see a problem with micro transactions D3 will have much lower competitiveness in gameplay. As gone are the click fest for items as gone are the spam of potions and hoarding of stat points into vitality and moving to a checkpoint save system. If a user wishes to purchase armors/weapons/runes/sex change utilizing micro transactions then wonderful they may use the money they have earned to do so, this will not affect the multiplayer story play through. As no one is forcing any other user to play with users making micro transactions.

You will only get items for your character class so what is the problem of prohibiting armor to specific classes as you will not see these armors unless a player in your game drops one only after picking it up.
This is not world of warcraft.

Maybe...Just maybe..He's talking about an Expansion Pack? (I doubt it, somehow, but it COULD be).
Frankly, I still prefer the expansion pack route over the current Rule Of DLC. Except for stuff like character skins and whatnot that I could care less about. Keep those as DLC, but give us our Lord Of Destruction and Immortal Throne for REAL updates.

"We don't have a lot of plans to do that. It would make our lives so much harder"


Awwww its soooo hard out here... awww the pain

I hope they dont let you mod the game like WoW where you can mod everything.. That shit kinda ruins the game especially when guild ask you to have the mods they want you to have or else you cant raid. It also made some encounters too easy.

Seems a little bastardly for them to not support mods in this day and age. It would extend the life of their games and if theyre worried about hacking they could have "stock only" servers etc.

First to say it?
B[ACTIOVISIONED]B

I'm not sure what people have been expecting... Blizzard hasn't made a good game since 2002/2003 (if you want to count the war3 expansion pack)

Goodbye modable games, hello DLC. Welcome to the future my friends.

I don't think I could have come back to Warcraft 3, Warcraft 2, Starcraft or Diablo as frequently as I did for as long as I did if it had upkeep.

Oh, fuck.

I was okay with 2 expansion packs from the get-go.

But this...

I dunno. We'll see.

What is going on over att Blizzard HQ? How much of Blizzard HQ is actually doing this and what is Moneyvision (activision)? Until D3 is released I wonder what shit they will come up with next to rip off consumers. SC2 has already been divded. Maybe they decied to split D3 to? Say there is 4 acts in D3 and they think hey SC2 split work, lets do the same thing to D3.... I would not be surprised :S

So long as I don't have to pay a monthly subscription to play Diablo 3 online with my friends and it doesn't get a tiered subscription service like Hellgate: London, I don't care. That shit is fucking stupid. One of the best things about Diablo and Guild Wars is that, once the games are bought, I can jump online and play at any time with the same things in my account as when I left them.

And come the fuck on, Blizzard. If ArenaNet can do it with Guild Wars, and they're a start-up that used Guild Wars as their first game, then why the fuck can't you with the absurd amount of moneyhats that was raked in through World of Warcraft? I understand no product should operate on the principle of losing money but, at some point, it becomes absurd. Even EA, that supposedly despised publisher of the world (wrongly so at this point, I believe), seems to be paying its revenue from its most popular games forward by releasing free and substantial downloadable content for gamers on marketplaces like Xbox Live which, as far as I know, really look down on large amounts of content being released to the Marketplace without a price tag attached.

I don't mind the Starcraft thing because, really, it'd be nice to see it released sooner rather than later. I don't mind the mod stuff because, at least for Diablo 3, I wouldn't use it anyway. The subscription stuff, though, annoys me.

"the team takes a strong stance on what they call the "hacking" of their games."

What a loaded statement, that's such bad journalism. Are you seriously comparing modern games' mod communities to creating blatant cheats like those that got used so commonly in Diablo 2?

Not to mention map hacks ARE called map HACKS. That makes putting the emphasis on Blizzard calling it that even sillier.

I have an idea. How about everyone can play the content of the retail box online for free, and then those who want ongoing content (which will provide no advantage over non-subscribers) can pay a monthly subscription fee. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Hmm. Subscription seems iffy but on the other hand, cheating is absolutely rampant in the fee-less Diablo 2...I suggest keeping TCP/IP multiplayer free though.

Remember, remember, the Failgate of London... ember.

Fuck it, I'm with capt tripps/bitter people on this one, Blizzard or not. Don't slice up Diablo 3 piecemeal for purchase and segment your playerbase. Whatever "features" they are better be things like 50 persistent b.net character slots for $10/year, or access to a super amazing web portal for item trading/auctioning so we can be less productive while at work.

What the hell happened to Blizzard? Activision I suppose. This is pretty sad :(