It's nice to see this coming from Blizzard, but it's not the 'full' story. They are just counter-acting piracy of the game by adding value through Battle.net. But they will defend Battle.net to the death.<p>The statements sound progressive and to a point they are, but this is just accomplished by moving the battle somewhere else. It's a lot easier to squash people trying to create alternate Battle.net servers/networks than it is to squash all of the cracking groups out there.<p>At least Blizzard is a company that is known for <i>not</i> abandoning their older titles (IIRC, you can still connect to Battle.net from the original StarCraft).<p>See:<p>- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd</a><p>- <a href="http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd" rel="nofollow">http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd</a><p>[On a side note...] I came across this Battle.net 404 page while searching, anyone know which came first?<p>- 404 Page <a href="http://eu.battle.net/starcraft-universe.shtml?rhtml=y" rel="nofollow">http://eu.battle.net/starcraft-universe.shtml?rhtml=y</a><p>- Original <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/system/icons/185/original/nickcage.jpeg?1240917662" rel="nofollow">http://knowyourmeme.com/system/icons/185/original/nickcage.j...</a>
Blizzard aren't being completely honest here. They aren't just making Battle.net so awesome people will want to pay for the game — they're specifically disabling LAN multiplayer so that people have no choice but to use Blizzard's servers for any real gameplay.<p>Fighting piracy by making people authenticate with a server just to use a feature that would otherwise work fine without an Internet connection? Back in my day, we called that "DRM."
It's worth noting that crackers have been working on the Starcraft 2 battle.net for months and still don't have working multiplayer. Server emulation is a lot harder than cracking a single player game.<p>The future of profitable software is in architectures that allow you to keep a significant portion of the code on your own servers and only "sell" the client application.
the problem with DRM is that it penalizes the legit users, without actually stopping the pirates. A lot of people started pirating, after their DRM software crapped out on them.
who cares about drm? Everybody in the game industry knows that "cloud computing" is the future.. Where the company holding the copyright do not have to release the entire binary. The future is services over fiber/4G networks. Distributed gaming that is. This may also mean that cheating as we know it will cease to exist.
I'm pretty sure just about everyone has realized this by now. IMHO the media companies are using it to draw out their demise to maximize revenue before collapse or drastic change inevitably comes about. It also buys time to think of a better answer.