Starcraft 2 Multiplayer May Become Free-To-Play
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Those two seem like a bad idea, to be honest. The former is more because a high-rank-player could just make a free account and then bash low-levels because the game considers him a low-level all the time because he doesn't buy tokens to play.omicron1 said:
And the latter would affec the balacing, no matter how you try it - which is in Starcraft ALWAYS something you should avoid as much as possible.
And that the SP gets sold is obvious as ONLY the MP is going to be F2P.
You don't. They just want to make it seperate and free now. They just don't know, how to still make profit that way, which is obvious hard in an RTS if you exclude buying units for actual money.rbstewart7263 said:
1. That's going to happen anyway.Bindal said:
2. Starcraft, sure - but I'm thinking more in terms of a Team Fortress 2-style "different but equivalent" approach that could well work for an RTS that isn't concerned first and formost with being e-sports balanced.
3. Aye, it's obvious - but it's also worth considering on its own merits as a way to monetize with F2P multiplayer.
Starcraft going free to play? Well maybe. They need to go all in with it and make just free, they could run adds on the menus or after game, but it they pay lock content that would really suck. As an avid player of Starcraft I would love to see Starcraft player base get bigger but locking content or giving a pay player an advantage would destroy what makes the game so special and ballanced.
This seems like the best way to do it, those who buy/bought the full game have nothing changed and the F2Pers get to play a number of matches per time period and can pay to play more.omicron1 said:
I can see that you believe I meant some offense, but free to play means free, if you have to pay for any of it at all ever, in order to experience the game as it is meant to be experienced, then it is not free, hence not free to play... currently the multiplayer is a facet of a game, that costs money.RJ 17 said:
If the semantics weren't being used in a way that aligns itself with what I stated, then why would it even be news, and why wouldn't there have been a huge rather more than noticable and possibly still ongoing outrage at starcraft 2 multiplayer having subscription fees... unlike every other rts of it's kind ever made.
Also, "Starter Edition" is just another way of saying demo. You get like 2 missions, and a couple maps you can play as terran only on in multiplayer, exactly what a demo is, a limited trial of the game that you don't have to pay for because it's just a taste to let you see what the game is like, so that you can make an informed decision on the purchase of the product, which I personally agree with and wish more games had demos nowadays, y'know like they all used to, but that's beside the point.
I understand that there could be some confusion in the wording of the OP, I only wished to clarify, and if I sound like a douche, it's because I'm a self centered sociopathic asshole with very few friends, and even they see my entire life as a running joke because I have terrible luck, an example, get an awesome job, find out grandmother has cancer in the same week, that was followed up with a herpes diagnosis and a crippling leg injury, costing me my job... that's just a taste, but hey, apparently I'm funny when I'm drunk or high, so considering my constant struggle to escape my pathetic existance through substance use, people tend to like me in person.
Only important question is whether that would allow custom maps. I have been holding off on buying SCII because I am still not sure whether there are any good custom maps (LoaP, AoS/DotA, RPG maps etc.) out there. The vanilla game never was for me, even in SC1 and WC3. Too many pseudo-pro dickweeds with unrealistically high expectations, too little fun.
Ya it's totally for eSports... the part Blizzard cares least about and where you always need the full game anyway.
No this is the "first hit for free and you will come back for more" drug dealing standard, and it works like a charm.
No this is the "first hit for free and you will come back for more" drug dealing standard, and it works like a charm.
I think Starcraft 2 is bought mostly for the multiplayer. The story has become a Firefly knock off and worse. Also you miss a lot unless you have read the books apparently. I guess it was natural to happen with 12 year in between games. The story wanted to continue on and changed drastically without a lot of people knowing. I just want to say Jim's six shooter in Starcraft makes no sense. I mean its nice to rip off the idea from pirates of the Caribbean but in Pirates it was a Old Timey one shot pistol. There are future guns now and Jim uses them all the time. Jack didn't fire other guns like Jim does. He doesn't fire any bullets at all until he can shoot who he is looking for. It had impact on the story. What is special about the bullet? Dusters in SPPPPAAAACCCCEEEEEE! Oh thats right people are cowboys now. Instead of Southern accents and names for things now it looks like people and locations from Firefly are in this game.CriticKitten said:
Anyway if I don't really intend to play the single player of the new one. But I do want the multiplayer. I feel like If I pay full price I would be paying for stuff I don't want to support.
It's odd how many people here are getting the wrong idea from this article.
Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, both the single player campaign and multiplayer components together, costs as much as any other AAA title. It's not on a subscription. eSports has been a priority for Blizzard on SC2; it is supposed to be eSports balanced, highly watchable, and difficult and entertaining to play at a high level.
League of Legends is a popular eSport title like SC2; it typically gets a lot of views, and this is credited to a large degree on its free-to-play business model. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and a large reason for this is that it's one of the most inexpensive sports.
Blizzard would be smart to reduce the cost of entry as much as they can. But making it actually free without ruining the game in some way might be difficult. If it were me, I would just make the multiplayer component 5 to 10 bucks and leave it as-is. If you want a successful esport title, make it cheap and rely on volume. If you can penetrate the mainstream consciousness by being a huge esport title that everyone watches, being cheap is fine. It's a bit of a gamble and requires being extremely competitive, but I see no reason why it can't be profitable. It needn't be as cheap as some sticks and a ball; it requires having a somewhat recently made computer, after all, so there is some barrier to entry already. Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry is the system requirements themselves. I know the fact that my relatively old CPU struggles to run the game smoothly often discourages me from playing even though I spent the 60 bucks.
If Blizzard wants to make it cheap, they just have to make an incredibly good game that they can sell to everyone and their mothers.
Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, both the single player campaign and multiplayer components together, costs as much as any other AAA title. It's not on a subscription. eSports has been a priority for Blizzard on SC2; it is supposed to be eSports balanced, highly watchable, and difficult and entertaining to play at a high level.
League of Legends is a popular eSport title like SC2; it typically gets a lot of views, and this is credited to a large degree on its free-to-play business model. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and a large reason for this is that it's one of the most inexpensive sports.
Blizzard would be smart to reduce the cost of entry as much as they can. But making it actually free without ruining the game in some way might be difficult. If it were me, I would just make the multiplayer component 5 to 10 bucks and leave it as-is. If you want a successful esport title, make it cheap and rely on volume. If you can penetrate the mainstream consciousness by being a huge esport title that everyone watches, being cheap is fine. It's a bit of a gamble and requires being extremely competitive, but I see no reason why it can't be profitable. It needn't be as cheap as some sticks and a ball; it requires having a somewhat recently made computer, after all, so there is some barrier to entry already. Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry is the system requirements themselves. I know the fact that my relatively old CPU struggles to run the game smoothly often discourages me from playing even though I spent the 60 bucks.
If Blizzard wants to make it cheap, they just have to make an incredibly good game that they can sell to everyone and their mothers.
I just see this as another attempt Acti-Blizzard is making to draw in more customers due to many other failing projects. (See Diablo 3 losing over 80% of it's player base within a few months of it's initial release.)
MoP is expected to try and bring customers back, but not likely. With other titans like Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and SW:TOR having been released, WoW is stagnating and Blizz can no longer rely on just it to keep the company afloat.
We saw this initially when Blizzard set up the Annual Pass, in which WoW customer's could enter a contract to maintain their subscription for a year, and in exchange they got a free mount, guaranteed beta access to MoP, and a digital copy of Diablo 3 for free.
With all this in mind, I look at the Multiplayer in SC2 going F2P not really about opening it up to the eSports crowd, but to try and get more customers. Blizzard really doesn't like admitting that they are actually losing money and that there are problems in how they are doing things. To be perfectly honest, the last storyline they had that I actually enjoyed was the campaign for Wings of Liberty, followed by Wrath of the Lich King's questlines. Diablo 3 had fun gameplay, but the Auction House and Loot system just constantly ruined my play experience due to them not letting me just play the game. If I wanted to have to deal with MMO problems, I'd play my MMO, not this.
TL;DR - Acti-Blizz won't admit they're losing money to stagnated content and poor business decisions, and this really an attempt to get more customers. (This theory, to me, also explains why all their games are still so damn expensive.)
MoP is expected to try and bring customers back, but not likely. With other titans like Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and SW:TOR having been released, WoW is stagnating and Blizz can no longer rely on just it to keep the company afloat.
We saw this initially when Blizzard set up the Annual Pass, in which WoW customer's could enter a contract to maintain their subscription for a year, and in exchange they got a free mount, guaranteed beta access to MoP, and a digital copy of Diablo 3 for free.
With all this in mind, I look at the Multiplayer in SC2 going F2P not really about opening it up to the eSports crowd, but to try and get more customers. Blizzard really doesn't like admitting that they are actually losing money and that there are problems in how they are doing things. To be perfectly honest, the last storyline they had that I actually enjoyed was the campaign for Wings of Liberty, followed by Wrath of the Lich King's questlines. Diablo 3 had fun gameplay, but the Auction House and Loot system just constantly ruined my play experience due to them not letting me just play the game. If I wanted to have to deal with MMO problems, I'd play my MMO, not this.
TL;DR - Acti-Blizz won't admit they're losing money to stagnated content and poor business decisions, and this really an attempt to get more customers. (This theory, to me, also explains why all their games are still so damn expensive.)
I feel like it's worth mentioning that SC2 does have a "ftp" version around. You can just play terran and you can't ladder at all (the matchmaking system).
So it's not as if this is something completely new like people have been saying.
Also SC2 does have problems with preloading things already, so skins would really be a big problem and bring a lot of unnecessary lag which people were already complaining about patch 1.5 for.
So it's not as if this is something completely new like people have been saying.
Also SC2 does have problems with preloading things already, so skins would really be a big problem and bring a lot of unnecessary lag which people were already complaining about patch 1.5 for.
Any free-to-play whose paying aspects involve balance issues (such as removing some units, yes) is extremely problematic and frankly not something I'd want to play. Even Tribes: Ascend which grants you numerous basic weapons from the start and has a way to unlock everything without paying is iffy in that regard, since unlocking additional weapons costs so much ingame credits (experience) that it's pretty outlandish to want to unlock it all without paying. But at least you have access to a good setup of classes and weapons and if you know which path you want to take, I guess you can plan ahead and invest. I just don't see that kind of approach working with Starcraft, which is basically an elaborate version of scissors, paper, rock. It would kind of suck to play scissors, paper, rock and be unable to use rock.