About Starcraft II...

[Silfir]

Shamus Young has formulated the entire extent of the rage and resignation that has been sizzling within me for weeks now in this comic with commentary.

Maybe they all read IBM guild manuals or something.

[yisk]

On the one hand, an interdiction of local game - a severe thing. In many countries the Internet insufficiently fast or insufficiently cheap. But on the other hand, in the same countries the piracy reaches the monstrous size. Licence disks here can be found only in the elite shops, all other shops trade in illegal production. Nobody will buy a licence disk if the piracy disk is cheaper 10-15 times. And how about torrents? Blizzard is simply tries to get profit.

[Silfir]

This decision is terrible especially from a profit standpoint. How many people who were going to buy the game are going to say "Fuck this" and pirate a copy they can actually play the way they have always played the first Starcraft? Well, the online petition now has nearly 120.000 signees. Even if we were to assume that only half of them actually were going to buy the game to begin with, and that half of those will end up buying the game anyway since they want it so bad, it's 30000 lost sales among those who bothered to sign the petition. The total number of lost sales will add up to much, much more.

How many people who were going to pirate the game will be saying "Gosh golly, now that they have removed one of the most essential features of any RTS game I sure will be buying it instead of downloading that cracked copy I found two hours before the initial release"? Accounting for the minimum quota of batshit crazy people, probably a couple, but nowhere near as many as the first group.

Pissing off your customers is about the worst possible thing to do if you want to make a profit.

[JellySlayer]

I'll play the devil's advocate here for a minute: it makes perfect sense not to include LAN capabilities. Starcraft's primary market is South Korea (according to Wikipedia, almost as many copies of SC have been sold in South Korea as the rest of the world combined), which has the highest one of the highest--if not the highest--broadband penetration in the world, at nearly 100%. None of these players will ever play a LAN game when they can get the same gameplay experience from their own home, the internet cafe, the library, whatever. As a consequence, it is a complete waste of time and money for Blizzard to dedicate programmers to making the game compatable with LAN networks, when vast majority of their customers will probably never use it--or, for that matter, have probably never even heard of such a thing as a LAN party. They aren't targetting the people in their late twenties or early thirties who played Starcraft casually almost a decade ago--they're targetting a generation of young Koreans who play the original Starcraft 8-10 hours a day now in hopes of making millions in the pro leagues.

Is it a way to keep people from pirating the game as well? Probably. Blizzard has obviously run the cost-benefit analysis and determined that LAN capability is not worth the cost to include, or not including it will reduce piracy of the game enough to overset the loss of the LAN market.

[yisk]

Almost all russian starcrafters now plays at piracy battlenet servers, or at the servers simulating a battlenet via UDP. And I can tell also that on these servers it is a tons of Ukrainians, Poles, Chileans etc. How to force all this public to pay money?

[Grey]

Whilst I've never been that into Starcraft (too much emphasis on speed rather than intelligence for my liking) I have to say that the most fun I've ever had with RTSes is playing them with friends you live with and getting very competitive. It's a lot easier these days thanks to wireless routers, and LAN gaming is so much more fun than impersonal online games (which are hard to set up with friends). I don't see how hard it would be to add LAN support - in fact it should be close to trivial in comparison to the scale of the project. And it really doesn't help much to deter piracy - hell, there's not much they really can do on that front. Seems a shame for them to drop such a fun feature. Won't stop people buying it of course, nor will it stop someone coming up with a LAN patch for the pirated version

[warheart]

I'll play the devil's advocate here for a minute: it makes perfect sense not to include LAN capabilities. Starcraft's primary market is South Korea (according to Wikipedia, almost as many copies of SC have been sold in South Korea as the rest of the world combined), which has the highest one of the highest--if not the highest--broadband penetration in the world, at nearly 100%. None of these players will ever play a LAN game when they can get the same gameplay experience from their own home, the internet cafe, the library, whatever. As a consequence, it is a complete waste of time and money for Blizzard to dedicate programmers to making the game compatable with LAN networks, when vast majority of their customers will probably never use it--or, for that matter, have probably never even heard of such a thing as a LAN party. They aren't targetting the people in their late twenties or early thirties who played Starcraft casually almost a decade ago--they're targetting a generation of young Koreans who play the original Starcraft 8-10 hours a day now in hopes of making millions in the pro leagues.

Is it a way to keep people from pirating the game as well? Probably. Blizzard has obviously run the cost-benefit analysis and determined that LAN capability is not worth the cost to include, or not including it will reduce piracy of the game enough to overset the loss of the LAN market.

Although what you say about % of South Korean players is true, the rest is not. In this kind of games people never use battle.net, they play using LAN simulators, that won't work without LAN support. And there are lots of LAN parties all around the world, which I can't imagine being played on battlenet. That would add a big problem to the games, and that's unstability. While you play on LAN, you can rely pretty much 100% on it being stable, not having any problems. But playing via battlenet would mean people dropping constantly, and that's really bad if you want to broadcast tournaments live.

[Silfir]

You don't get pirates to pony up for your game by screwing over honest customers - you don't protect your crops from vermin using battery acid either. This isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater, this is grabbing the baby and tossing it head-first at a wall while drinking the bathwater.

LAN is a prerequisite for competitive play at the highest level. No matter how good the internet connection is, a LAN connection will always be the one with the lowest lag possible. So there will be LAN play somehow in the end version, possibly you only have to be connected to the internet while playing over LAN. Which is still bone-headed.

Besides, they are trying to sell the game in countries other than South Korea, perhaps? North America has large, sparsely populated areas where fast internet connection is a luxury not available to everyone. Funnily enough, if your internet connection sucks, it is much less of a hassle to drive to the nearest mall and buy the game instead of waiting until it trickles in through the torrent. This is precisely the group of people that won't use battle.net, but will happily organize LAN parties with their other internet-impaired friends who bought the copy to get their multiplayer experience. Now they have to download a pirated version to do that or abandon their multiplayer experience entirely - think they will still spend the gas on that drive to the mall? Blizzard should pray that whatever scheme they are cooking up can be fixed with a simple small-size patch that can be downloaded quickly even over dial-up.

I'm not sure what kind of cost-benefit analysis they have been running if they think they will gain more sales in this way, but I imagine potions of booze and an unhealthy dose of undiluted ignorance were involved. They will not be losing enough sales to not make the game a success, but I guess they just got tired of printing money the way they still do with Starcraft, Diablo II or Warcraft III.

[omega_red]

Blizz said that while BNet connection will still be required, players will actually communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Both sides should be content. :P

[Kato]

Blizz said that while BNet connection will still be required, players will actually communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Both sides should be content. :P

I have my doubts to be honest. Even still, your "peer to peer" manner is going to be sending info back and forth to the servers. Just to let them know that you have a legit copy and are playing in a "peer to peer" method. It's not a good move...LAN play should be supplied out of the box as it should be. LAN playable.