Why, Blizzard, WHY?!?!?!

[01d55]

So it seems that the later campaigns are xpacs, not stand alone games:
http://www.starcraft2.com/faq.xml#trilogy

They sound pretty much like Brood Wars except the campaigns are monoracial.

And "monetizing battle.net?"
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/13/bl...et-monetizing/

So Julian Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?

Wow, that's an evil way of putting it. Julian's turning into a business guy on me. Here's the way I would put it. We're definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game. It's clearly not an MMO, so it's not appropriate to do a business model like that. The way we approach all of our games now, is we come up with what we think is a great game, and then we wrap the appropriate business model around it. If that's just a box price, then that's that.

With Battle.Net we're definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We're not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We're not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.

[ironymaster]

Yeah I bet they aren't... </sarcasm>

[Aeria]

Y'all should quit counting your lizards before they hatch, they just might turn out to be chickens. Or something.

What I got out of the article was that the core of Battle.net would be free, but then there'd be a whole bunch of extra garbage that they'll charge for. It might not be that bad!

Oh, and while I'm not a die-hard fan, Starcraft rules. It's the only video game my dad still plays!

[Dørmatte]

I personally wouldn't care if they came with a press release that said they'd charge 4 times what a normal game costs because "we make pretty awesome games and feel that this is reasonable", since they'd be right.

I got into starcraft too late and jumped to warcraft 3 right as it was released, but the game and its expansion pack - thanks to the editors included and the great community - gave me probably hundreds of times more entertainment than most games I've played, except the likes of Baldur's Gate and Aplha Centauri. I've also recently played Command & Conquer 3 alot, and after going through the sheer hell that is their online services, battle.net seems like a wonderful vacation by comparison.

My personal opinions aside, I don't really see how this is different from releasing a finished online product with a satisfying single player campaign, then coming with expansion packs that lengthen the campaign and add more units for the online part. Except perhaps that they're announcing it before they do it.