E3 2009: Battle.net 2.0 Paid Service a Possibility?

Isengard

Isengard

No Hobbits Allowed
Blizzard CEO and President Mike Morhaime evaded a question in the public Q&A during a Activision Blizzard conference call held outside the boundaries of E3 2009. Are there any plans to monetize Battle.net 2.0 service? Mike Morhaime limited to answer: “I’m not ready to talk about that today”.

It looks like Morhaime will talk about this topic at BlizzCon 2009 this August 21-22 in Anaheim. The question to ponder is whether Battle.net 2.0 will remain a free service or not. Will StarCraft Vanilla remain free on legacy Battle.net while its sequel is subscription based? Will there be a free and a subscription based services to play StarCraft II? Hellgate: London had a similar platform where you could play for free, or subscribe to get additional benefits—which in our side of the fence would translate into eSports services.

StarCraftWire.net will be at BlizzCon reporting everything about StarCraft II to you, and watching closely a follow up about Blizzard’s plans for its Battle.net 2.0 platform service. This thread is open for discussion and speculation, for as long as everyone is clear none of it is a fact.
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Linkage

They better not. Hamachi hacks will become prominent then. Don't they make enough off WoW subs?
 
That's very sneaky of them. It's true what hideinlight says. If they make it a pay for service then the only way to play Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 is to pay that monthly fee.

Is that why they dropped the LAN option?
 
Solitude said:
That's very sneaky of them. It's true what hideinlight says. If they make it a pay for service then the only way to play Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 is to pay that monthly fee.

Is that why they dropped the LAN option?
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Look at it this way: There's about 500 000 people playing dota alone at any time on Garena.
Not to mention the numbers on the pvpgn type severs. On the local dota server alone there's 1500 users at peak times.
Without LAN that wouldn't be possible. Also the inclusion of LAN according to them made it easier for people to create private servers.

In their minds. Remove LAN and you have no "competition" and have total control over all the users. Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 aren't just any games, they probably the most sought after titles in the world atm. The only way to enjoy the multiplayer aspect which is the most popular would be to by the game and probably pay the monthly fee. Including LAN would potentially deprive them of a couple of hundred million dollars, a risk they are not willing to take.

Bnet 2.0 might actually take advantage of the userbase build up by the private servers and garena. We wouldn't have had 1500 dota players if the private server didn't exist and if we weren't able to introduce it to our friends via LANs.

But things are gonna get interesting though, expect a massive increase in hackers trying to obtain notoriority by creating a private server.
Blizzard got smart, create games that everyone wants and make them pay for it if they wanna don't wanna play it all by themselves.
 
hideinlight said:
Look at it this way: There's about 500 000 people playing dota alone at any time on Garena.
Not to mention the numbers on the pvpgn type severs. On the local dota server alone there's 1500 users at peak times.
Without LAN that wouldn't be possible. Also the inclusion of LAN according to them made it easier for people to create private servers.

In their minds. Remove LAN and you have no "competition" and have total control over all the users. Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 aren't just any games, they probably the most sought after titles in the world atm. The only way to enjoy the multiplayer aspect which is the most popular would be to by the game and probably pay the monthly fee. Including LAN would potentially deprive them of a couple of hundred million dollars, a risk they are not willing to take.

Bnet 2.0 might actually take advantage of the userbase build up by the private servers and garena. We wouldn't have had 1500 dota players if the private server didn't exist and if we weren't able to introduce it to our friends via LANs.

But things are gonna get interesting though, expect a massive increase in hackers trying to obtain notoriority by creating a private server.
Blizzard got smart, create games that everyone wants and make them pay for it if they wanna don't wanna play it all by themselves.
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To be honest, as much as I want to play the two games, I won't pay for BNet. One customer lost if that's the case.
 
Link for official confirmation of no lan for Sc2 and i will believe u. I think they will always have lan for StarCraft. And IF (big if) they do decide to remove it would have ALOT of peed off koreans. Diablo 3 i can understand as even at LAN's there was not alot of Diablo games being played, Diablo to me was more of a single player awesomeness to me.

As for the bnet 2.0, if they were clever, they wud only put pay for services for things such as VOIP, that i can understand paying for and would gladly do it.
 
_Caboose_ said:
Link for official confirmation of no lan for Sc2 and i will believe u. I think they will always have lan for StarCraft. And IF (big if) they do decide to remove it would have ALOT of peed off koreans. Diablo 3 i can understand as even at LAN's there was not alot of Diablo games being played, Diablo to me was more of a single player awesomeness to me.

As for the bnet 2.0, if they were clever, they wud only put pay for services for things such as VOIP, that i can understand paying for and would gladly do it.
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Diablo3 no Lan
http://forums.diii.net/showthread.php?t=687933

Like usual Blizzard has been evading the issue concerning Starcraft2. Including LAN for one and not the other wouldn't go down to well.

"While the idea is still there, the main focus right now is Battle.net and Multiplayer to determine whether or not LAN will be available."
 
Lydon said:
To be honest, as much as I want to play the two games, I won't pay for BNet. One customer lost if that's the case.
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Until you find out your the only one not playing it.
The main reason I want StarCraft2 though is because of the engine and it's user generated content.
If Battle.net 2.0 is a paid service then that's gonna suck bigtime...
 
But we are so COOOOOOOL!

I don't mind paying... but i better have decent internet for it and it can be $20 a year at most. I've been playing war3 for the past 7 years, so there is no way i'm not getting starcraft 2.

*And i'l hack a lan option for SC2 and D3 if it doesn't have it ;)*
 
If they don't have lan, I can almost guarantee that it will be hacked in within a few weeks of release. These are the times when I'm thankful for such people.
 
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