Ail said:
World of Warcraft simple easy, make ppl connect online every time they play and do not include the whole game in what you ship... And before you argue that it's different because it's an MMORPG, Blizzard actually considered seriously using the same model for Starcraft 2 ( make it so you coudn't play singleplayer without a battlenet connection). In the end they decided against it but we don't know yet what they will decide for Diablo 3... It's not that hard really, only ship half of the game and host the other half... Even if somehow pirates can find a way to duplicate your servers, it's not practical for them to host for free competiting servers from an economical point of view ( and shutting down competiting servers isn't that hard, Blizzard has done that numerous times..)
That's what the cloud is all about. Business software are starting to embrace heavilly this, video games developers will be next. It has the advantage of removing some of the pesky hardware requirements most PC games have too... |
No it doesn't. There are servers which allow users to play for free. Blizzard can't get revenue when people host their own private game servers and never pay Blizzard for their tiime playing. I know several people who still host these servers so their friends can play for free.
