Maybe D3 will open some new startup opportunities? Yes.. yes that's what I'll tell myself. It's all research.

I personally wanted to make a game guide for Infinity Blade 2 but epic legal threatened me out of it (and we had a friendly pre-existing relationship, which counted for exactly nothing. they'd interviewed me for their website and sent me free stuff, and i had a free guide on their forum with 200k views that they had made sticky). Dealing with their legal crap wasn't worth the hassle. I was even willing to give them undeserved money to be left alone, but they wanted a large cash payment upfront and were unwilling to discuss any other payment approach.

Anyway the point is game guides should be a pretty good small business opportunity -- there is a very real market for help playing games better and being more successful in them -- but there are (baseless but real) legal problems so be wary.

You might expect game companies to be thrilled to have services sold around their games, which their customers find provides game-related value to them. Just like Apple is happy to see other people selling iPhone cases. But a lot of game companies are not happy and will harass you.

It seems to me that usually these game companies have a publishing (as in, books) branch that manages the official guides. THEY'RE the ones who can't accept any competition, possibly due to their contracts with Prima/Brady (or whoever).

Even so, I suppose you'd have to defend the fair-use in court.

If they've published their own game guide, just don't take any material from it and you won't be violating any copyrights on that either.

For trademark, the point is to prevent consumers from being confused about who is responsible for products, so people can build up a brand name and have a reputation they are responsible for and have control over. Guide titles like, "Ubergeek's Ultimate Unofficial Guide to Diablo 3" do not violate trademark because they do not cause any confusion about whose product this is. It's well established that you can use someone else's trademark as a substring in your product title when it's important to explaining what your product is and won't cause consumer confusion. (Similarly, "Pegasus Case for iPhone" or "Ubergeek's iPod Battery Replacement Kit" would not violate trademark.)

But, yes, as you say: being completely right doesn't prevent you having to defend yourself and spending time and money on that. (Could you recoup lawyers fees after you win? I have no idea about that.)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. (But I have read some legal sources about this.)

I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games like WoW and the new Star Wars MMO will be child's play.

In 10 years I expect the phenomenon of losing your job or your relationship over game addiction will be much wider spread and we may see an effort by the govt to put caps on experiences in 15 years.

Once you can capture most all the methods of input from a player and produce multiple levels of output all for the purpose of engaging the player longer and longer, there has to be a governor at some point... until 25+ years from now where the tech is so advanced that some people's jobs are just to exist in these virtual worlds (i.e. marketers for Apple sitting at social hubs inside of Galaxy of Warcraft 50.0 talking people into checking out the new iPad inside the game where they can click a button to pre-order it in real life after playing with a 3D model of it in virtual-life).

sigh I don't stand a chance...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio

PS: Also, women tend to have more marriages per lifetime than men which shifts things a fair amount.

You are here to have an experience, logging on and having that experience elsewhere is fine if it isn't destroying lives around you.

Then you think 40 or 50 years out with undetectable differences between virtual reality and real-reality and you wonder if at some point we did get lost in a virtual world we created for ourselves a la Matrix... how would we know?

You could also imagine a world within a world once the virtual world is so real it isn't as fun.

Endless recursion :)

Luckily, I've sworn off Blizzard since they sued the bnetd guys, so D3 isn't a concern for me.

It's a Rogue-like game. The learning curve is rather steep, but worth it imho.

This freaked me out for a second.

Well, we did other things. Like rollerblade, take some trips and plan a wedding. But . . .

May 16 I will be sick. I'll pre-schedule the carpal tunnel surgery for mid June . . . :/

I suspect that you'll have Blizzard not only taxing transactions, but being the counter-party in many of them anyway. If they can control the drop rate for farmers (and hence the perceived value), yet can materialize items at will what's to stop them from turning it into an infinite money machine?

I managed to abstain from that, but I did pre-buy and pre-load the game. I was just so excited they had Mac support (which, last I'd heard, was sort of up in the air I thought).

Unlike companies like EA, Blizzard spends real time making sure their Mac offerings are as good as the Windows ones and that is enough for myself to be a supporter.

They fixed it in a later patch. But it wasn't exactly great support if a 100% mac crash bug, in a short beta playthrough, didn't get found/fixed before they pushed the version.

Also, FYI, there are a number of mac-only bugs in Warcraft 3, today. I have to play on bootcamp or wine for various custom maps. And Starcraft 2 has had mac-only mouse bugs (like your cursor disappears in the middle of the game. leave and re-enter fullscreen to fix). Based on patch notes they might have fixed that recently, i haven't checked. It happened pretty often and is obviously very frustrating.

I see where you're coming from but I've experienced stuff like this while testing games for all platforms, same thing happened for NWN on Windows. This is what betas are for! :)

I experienced that same SC2 bug for a long time and it's annoying, but when I compare its Mac support to other games (Dragon Age, anything by Valve) I can see how much time Blizzard spends making sure everything works alright.

Question about heat: My wife's MBP (2011) runs what seems to be dangerously hot doing even basic web video and she's worried that D3 will melt it entirely.

Makes me appreciate them even more. :)

One of the little gotchas for those who do not like leaving the CC with vendors or choose one time pay options.

http://www.diablowiki.net/Diablo_I

Now? Blizzard's doing all they can to control the whole experience. No LAN capabilities, shameful treatment of the bnetd folks, and others that have been mentioned here. Contrast to id games who open source their engines and invite folks to build on them.

I generally dislike multiplayer in games and only really play single player games. I don't have much interest in multiplayer games at all really - I find other players ruin my experience and wreak the immersion. The only games I like to play multiplayer now are Minecraft and Terraria. I do occasionally play first person shooters multiplayer, but its fairly rare. In fact, the last few times it was two player split-screen modern warfare with someone who was sitting beside me.

So it should be obvious that I have nothing to gain from requiring a constant internet connection. I saw somewhere that Blizzard were saying they are requiring this so you can migrate characters between single and multiplayer without the risk of players cheating - this is just not a use case for me at all because I will never migrate my single player character to multiplayer. I'd much rather have an option to make a single player only character that doesn't require constant internet.

So besides not wanting or needing that feature, why else do I not want to be forced to be online all the time? I don't usually play games on a laptop while traveling, so that doesn't apply to me, but while I do have reasonably fast internet, over the past year I have had random disconnections (mostly due to issues with wifi, including wireless adapter breaking and wireless interference) and the occasional outage. Usually when my internet isn't working, since I use it for work, I will fire up a game for a little while until the internet is working again or until I feel like fixing it. I've already been bitten by steam a few times so I now default to leaving it in offline mode, only going online when I want to check for updates or buy/install a game. In the past three months, I've been irritated more than a handful times that I couldn't play certain games because I didn't have an internet connection for whatever reason. While this alone wouldn't put me off buying a game, coupled with my overall distaste for multiplayer, I don't see why I should have to pay (in frustration) for being online when I play a single player game.

So, for those reasons, I will never buy Diablo 3, even though I was looking forward to it.

It sucks because Diablo 1 and 2 supported local play but if Diablo 3 were the first in the series I don't think anyone would be complaining.

This is a step down in features for the consumer (just like the step down in features for Starcraft 2 from 1). There's no reason to paint a rosy picture about it. Last I checked there were still more active custom Warcraft 3 games than SC2 games and that speaks volumes.

You honestly think they said "hmm, let's save money by requiring online to play so we can better serve the customer." or do you think they said "let's make more money by further ensuring the integrity of our real money auction house and giving us more control over the product."

I have to disagree. Diablo 2's robust player economy was the driving force behind the game's lasting success (hence the advent of cash auctions in Diablo 3).

Hell, my favourite mod is still being actively developed: http://modsbylaz.hugelaser.com/

I has been common knowledge for a while that Diablo III will likely see a console port. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that that didn't severely impact the design of the game.

Only time will tell if their IP has the traction to overcome the limitations of their system, and how that impacts future iterations of their games.

The Australian dollar is currently worth (marginally) more than the US Dollar, and yet the game costs an extra $20 here. I don't understand how this is justifiable.

It's not about exchange rates and never ever will be. It's about purchasing power. It's just normal market segmentation, like how textbooks are cheaper in India/China than in the U.S.

Whats the average purchasing power of an Australain versus an American?

The Australian dollar is worth more than the US Dollar, and what's Australia's minimum wage? What's America's? They're about $15 and $7 respectively. If anything, Blizzard could probably stand to charge Australians even more.

But I'm sure they've done the math on this, and there might be other factors, but I'd gander that in terms of purchasing power the costs of the game to an American and Australian are probably pretty similar.

Now if you were making money in the U.S. and had to spend it in Australia, then you'd be very right to meow about exchange rates, since they don't take into account purchasing power, but very very few people who buy the Australian game are going to be in that position.

Having the same price for every country inside the UE and not using the actual conversion rate hurts even more the people in countries where average wage is bellow US wages.

It wouldn't hurt them that much having different prices for different countries inside the UE, just make it so you need a credit card from the country to pay the price corresponding to that country.

(at least there is amazon.co.uk and I am a little happier)

I guess it's particularly frustrating when you compare it to a company like Valve - who set the same prices for Australia as they do for the US (not sure about other regions) for all of their new releases. Even Apple have brought the App Store price tiers almost to parity between the two regions.

I suppose that they did do the math though - as you said - I think they just priced me into ordering an import instead. A quick look around has shown a few online retailers offerring it for less than $AUD 60.

Meow.

A blanket statement like this is not correct. iPhones aren't cheaper in China. Louis Vuitton purses aren't cheaper in China.

Prices are what the market will bear in that country. $60 is what video games cost in America. More than that and Blizzard would see a dent in their sales that likely would not make up for any increase in price. Similarly, Blizzard probably isn't charging more (or much more) for Diablo in Australia because all other video games are that price.

In EU, Apple hardware or games are often priced at the same amount as in the US, but in Euros, not $. No wonder: the price includes value-added tax (20% or so, depending on the country) and the seller has to account for significantly stricter consumer protection laws. For example, the standard warranty period is one year in the US; in my country, the law requires two years; that's got to affect the price.

Is it the box with air in it, only? Which is ridiculous for a game which is only playable with a net connection.

And the battle.net site suggests you can buy a digital copy. If so, why can'y you buy the digital copy? What prevents you from?

While Blizzard itself charges full retail prices...

http://www.game.co.uk/en/diablo-iii-collectors-edition-16712...

I think D3 will be more of what we got in SC2: essentially the same game but prettier. Which is sad because Diablo, WC2, SC and WoW were blockbusters (edit)in large part(/edit) because of their innovations.

(Hopefully unnecessary disclaimer: I work on Guild Wars 2.)

I wouldn't be surprised if this move forced Arena Net to push back to a Thanksgiving release, since people generally don't play two online "collect-em-all" games at once.

(disclosure: I too own ATVI.)

Anything less and i´m not interested.

In a way they are like a high-end Zynga, always about the mechanics, always about the "feel"... keep you playing, keep you playing, keep you playing... because if yuo are playing you'll want the new Sword of Sadness from the auction house and put down the $3 real dollars for it instead of mining orbs for a week.

So D3 has been in the making longer than your average PC title, but it's not quite as bad!

On the Web 2.0 environment, who started this? Was it Google with Gmail, or was there something else before?

Also, lately, at least in the MMO scene, going gold doesn't mean that the game is polished and ready for release, it just means that you're ready to charge customers.

Blizzard DOES use the beta for hype. With SC2 they gave beta keys to preorders to help generate revenue and interest prior to launch. Not a lot of participants actually know the reason for a beta and actually use it as an excuse to play the game early but Blizzard already knows this.

Blizzard's job of releasing a public/invite beta is to test:

A) How the game functions on the boat-load of machine configurations available. When you sign up for beta invite on battle.net you need to create a "profile" of yourself by uploading your PC specs. Blizzard has always provided games that can run on a low end machine with features and graphical tweaks that still allow it to look good on a new machine. For me SC2 had to run on low/medium on my 2 year old laptop but with my new PC it runs on Ultra with great effects!

B) Network stability. B.net2.0 is rather new and they need to test the matching functionality as well as load test the servers for every reason under the sun. Having willing participants allows them to hit all these goals while still generating the hype.

Network stability is mostly tested on specific moments like stress test weekends or at the end of a beta, when they let everyone in to see how far they can push their hardware.

Of couse this and general behaviour in various hardware configurations need to be tested. But it's not the ultimate point of a beta anymore, at least not in the later stages.

I can see it all the time, players just want to get into a beta to see if they like a game before they pay for it, rather than to help make it better.

I don't know how you expect for them to get good data on what people do to accurately test unless they do a large scale beta to test it

But I'm not targeting Blizzard specifically, just MMO companies in general. All the releases from the past few years all went the same way.

If twitter of any blizz guy was updated? SIgn of the beta. New picture on the website? Sign of the beta. A sneeze came from 4th floor blizzard HQ? Sign of the beta.