StarCraft II Cost $100 Million To Develop 414
UgLyPuNk writes with news of a report that Blizzard has spent over $100 million developing StarCraft II. Initial development on the game began in 2003, and it's due to be released on July 27th. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick "described StarCraft as one of the company’s seven 'pillars of opportunity' (where each pillar has the potential to deliver operating profit between $500 million and $1 billion over its life span)." The finalized system requirements for the game have been released, and players planning to buy the digitally distributed version can download it now, though it won't be playable until the 27th.
Will not be surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
If the crackers find a way to play before the start date.
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect it will be at least a little while before one can play a pirated copy of the game online, though, which reduces the value significantly. AFAIK all online play requires going through Blizzard's Battle.net service.
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People won't be able to play on Battle.net without a key. However, StarCraft II's going to be big enough that someone will come up with a hack to make it possible to play online with pirated copies. It's just a matter of how long it takes.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
StarCraft (1) had a battle.net "replacement" for pirated games and those banned on battle.net. It essentially run battle.net-like server called fsgs that required you to replace a single file in your starcraft directory to connect to. After replacement, clicking battle.net in game took you to fsgs lobby.
And it was pretty active community until blizzard shut it down (iirc) a few years ago. I would be very surprised if someone won't make a similar service for SC2, especially in light of how quickly world of w
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last time i checked, ICCup server located was Russia, central hub for broodwar community, was alive and kicking. Admins tailored the bnetd/fsgs code to their needs, implemented bunch of cool stuff, working ladder and antihack among the others. It's light years above the blizzard's battle.net which is abandoned by the blizzard for many years already.
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I wish more game makers thought the same way. Ive just never really enjoyed playing online against mostly 12 year old kids. I've picked up a few PC games before that looked fun, but immediately put them back once I saw the "Broadband connection required" in the requirements. Perhaps I'm an oddity in the gaming world, but I really don't enjoy online games. (I cant stand MMO games what-so-ever, Its kinda like the dregs of the internet were swept up and put into a trash can labeled WoW)
Posting anon cause I
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Does it? I have zero interest in online play for StarCraft. It's also worth noting that Blizzard is planning two standalone expansions, neither of which will be necessary for a complete online experience. That is, they're single player-only expansions. Blizzard apparently thinks, probably correctly, that most of their money is coming from people who are primarily interested in the campaigns.
Incorrect sir.
From the Official StarCraft II FAQ: [starcraft2.com]
Q: Will we still be able to play multiplayer matches of StarCraft II with all three races?
A: Yes! From the beginning, StarCraft II will be a fully featured multiplayer game, and all three races will be available for competitive play.
Q: How will the expansion sets impact multiplayer gameplay?
A: The expansion sets will add new content to each race for use in multiplayer matches. This could include additions such as new units, abilities, and structures, along with new maps and Battle.net updates.
Q: If I buy StarCraft II but don't buy any of the expansion sets, will I still be able to play online?
A: Yes. This will work similarly to Warcraft III and the original StarCraft, which maintained separate online gaming lobbies and ladders for expansion set players and players with the base Warcraft III or StarCraft.
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Aren't college students the least likely to ever purchase the game if given the choice? Isn't it the college students who have access to huge bandwidth net connections? You're either an old man stuck in the past or just completely clueless.
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Funny)
"If the crackers find a way to play before the start date."
Indeed, white people can be very impatient.
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Conventional cryptography is very much up to the task of just giving the user the locked box, presumably with a dinky little stub program that will grab the decryption key when it is released.
There have been attacks, or inside jobs, before, so the decryption key(or a few vital binaries, if they went with that approach, or used it to augment this one), could theoretically get leaked; but the task of giving somebody something on day X and only releasing it on day X+Y is theoretically unproblematic. You have to actively fuck it up.
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Nearly...
DRM is physically impossible because it means giving the user the locked box, the key, and a list of commands for its cpu to make it pretend that the key only exists on every second tuesday, and then expecting the user to neither look at the key, nor touch the list of commands, before feeding them to its cpu.
There, fixed that for you.
This is what talking out of your ass looks like (Score:2)
they SPENT ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS
YOU DOUBT? IT WAS WORTH IT? it was worth 100 million
if that kind of development expense in the private sector doesn't warrant new technology
then exactly does make it worth developing a new type of lock box for?
Re:This is what talking out of your ass looks like (Score:5, Insightful)
You would simply take the release installer, and encrypt a copy with a key known only to you(and probably stored on a securely-locked-away air-gapped medium, to prevent leaks.
Add a little stub program that does nothing but check your website for the key, decrypt the installer binary, and start the installation.(Because a key doesn't need to be all that long in order to be functionally unbreakable, it is even practical for those without web access to type a suitably encoded version of the key in manually).
Absolutely no "innovating" needed. Basically any encryption method that isn't declared "deprecated" will work, and implementations of most of them are available under pretty much any license you want. The total implementation time will be a few hours for a competent programmer(and it need not be a competent programmer who has any knowledge of the project, this is quite a generic thing), possibly a man-day or two if the decrypter needs QA on 15 different Windows localizations and some attractive splash-screen art. And yet, despite the ease of implementation, even three letter agencies won't be able to get to it until you release the decryption key.
Aside from the fact that it is easy and robust, the main reason to use a separate system for the "release date control" vs. whatever DRM is used post-release, is that market research suggests that the financial damage of having your DRM cracked tapers off fairly rapidly post-release. Having would-be early adopters downloading pre-release cracked copies instead of buying $150 "platinum packs" with a couple of useless trinkets is financially painful. Having cheapskates a year from now picking up off the Pirate Bay rather than Ebay is virtually irrelevant. In between, the value falls over time, fast at first, and gradually tapering off.
If the installer binary is encrypted, would-be DRM-hackers don't even get to look at the DRM until release day(whereas, if you depended on the release-DRM, they would have the extra 10 days of hacking done before the game is even supposed to be released). This means that the chance of a pre-release pirate version(barring a penetration of your systems by hackers or inside guys) will be impossible, and the time-to-working-crack will be 10 days longer than it otherwise would be...
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Considering how trivial it is to implement the installer fetching the decryption key from a server, I don't follow your logic. We're barely talking a few lines of code, and nothing the installer could do would make the decryption key pop up on that server any sooner. Simple to implement, and unbreakable for all practical purposes.
I believe Valve has done it like this for years for their own titles, and I can't remember any of those preloads being cracked (note that I'm talking about the preloads made availa
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like my post didn't get submitted.
The install files are encrypted with a 21 byte key. I couldn't figure out which encryption scheme, but even if it was developed inhouse. Reversing it and finding a weakness would take a long time.
Like I said earlier. It fetches the decryption key from blizzard on the 27th. On said site is nothing.
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For those too lazy to think, realize this is 168-bit, not 21-bit. He said bytes.
It's an odd number though. I bet it's 128-bit with some extra "stuff" going on.
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It conveniently matches the standard key size of triple DES.
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1. Wrap the whole stuff in AES.
2. Release the key on release date.
This is not the DRM problem of giving the locked box and the key, you simply don't give the key.
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Informative)
People don't buy Blizzard games to play single player.
I do. In fact I've never played any Blizzard games any other way.
I'm not a fan of the 'tank rush' strategy playing these games online requires
so I doubt i'll ever play one of them online.
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You probably won't like it anyways. I tried the beta. My teammate dropped shortly after starting, leaving it as 1vs2 (2 being the computer, on the easiest mode).
I was absolutely destroyed by a heterogeneous mob of enemy units before I even had my pants on.
I don't like RTS games that make me manage economy and production. Give me a set group of units and an objective, and I'm good. Give me a "command center" and a few "workers" and I hate you.
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I was absolutely destroyed by a heterogeneous mob of enemy units before I even had my pants on.
Look, I'm not one to question what goes on behind closed doors, but dude, the pants thing might be why you lost.
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
You may not get into it for single player, but there are those of us who don't play WoW because we don't have the time and like a good offline gaming experience.
Not that I'm arguing for piracy here - If I want to play I'll buy - but online is not the only thing going and I hope they haven't neglected offline play. Knowing Blizzard though, they won't have neglected it because they do put so very much effort into making their games perfect.
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
The only missing "features" in offline mode will be unlocking achievements, saving your progress on the cloud, and sending in-game and cross-game messages while playing single player. Not one of those actually has any impact whatsoever on the game itself (presuming you don't mind copying save files to a portable storage device to continue your game progress on another machine, which is a practice nearly as old as gaming itself).
Re:Will not be surprising (Score:5, Informative)
So what?
People don't buy Blizzard games to play single player. Sure it's still enjoyable and a good game but you will spend the majority of the time gaming online. And you won't be able to do that on battle.net without a valid key.
Actually, Blizzard said that over half of the Starcraft players don't intend to ever play multiplayer. I tried my best to find you a link to show it, but I failed. I hope someone else has it.
I do have a link on Blizzard's stance on DRM though: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/28/0614256/Blizzard-Boss-Says-Restrictive-DRM-Is-a-Waste-of-Time [slashdot.org]
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I've got to join the chorus, and say that I too only play Starcraft for the single player.
I bought the original the week it launched, and Brood Wars soon after it came out. I've played the campaign mode for each dozens of times over the years. I *have* played online, but just don't find it that much fun. I like tying the strategy to a storyline.
I don't doubt that the mix of campaign players vs multiplayer players is close to 50/50 as another poster said.
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Well, they (the game industry generally) better find a way to change the relationship attitude it has with its customers from the current one of open hostility, if it ever hopes to keep hackers from figuring out a way to break their DRM.
Sony was doing a decent job with the PS3 until it recently removed support for third-party operating systems. That hostile act is sure to be met with hostility from the other side. While there were always scattered attempts to hack the
and still (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:and still (Score:5, Interesting)
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Regardless, LAN games don't need an internet connection beyond maybe a single o
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Ever heard of the military much? Despite the fantasy that everyone can be fully-connected at all times, the reality is that the internet is not all that ubiquitous.
Re:and still (Score:5, Informative)
I can think of plenty of situations:
- LAN party in a plane
- LAN party while camping
- LAN party in a moving vehicle, other than a plane
- LAN party while on military deployment
- others
Why should you limit you gaming to the presence of an internet connection?
No LAN because of tyranny of the majority + profit (Score:2, Interesting)
Paranoia and profits is why you can skip LAN'ing, or even discourage it.
Anything that doesn't have to phone home to function is easily cracked. Roughly ten years ago, I played Starcraft 1 constantly, through single player and dozens of LAN parties, and never paid for it. I never cared much for battle.net.
And unlike 10 years ago, the cases where people cannot phone home with broadband access, or even internet access itself, are rare. Even console systems are borderline dependent on internet access these days
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Re:and still (Score:5, Informative)
Our Military is deployed to many different locations. Sea for those in the Navy. Then there are all of those deployed Overseas to various NATO bases. Internet connectivity in the barracks is pretty slim there. Don't forget about all the other stations such as the EWRS (early warning radar stations) in Alaska.
Others include Cruise Ships - Yes there are some cruises geared towards Lan Parties. 3-5 day cruises and people do pay for them.
Re:and still (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_LAN#Peer-to-peer [wikipedia.org]
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/11/12/military-wives-form-non-profit-to-equip-troops-with-video-games [gamepolitics.com]
The thing is, adding LAN play obviously is a drop in the ocean compared to the $100 million; they have all the network code done, it would simply be a matter of writing some code that instead of send requests for games to Battle.net, sending them locally.
The real reason is obviously to reduce "piracy" by tying the game to their online service, and screwing their costumers in the process, as it has become usual nowadays.
Re:and still (Score:5, Informative)
When you purchase Starcraft II, you're not buying the bits on the disk. You're paying for the registered account to play through their network. If you try to sell the disk to Gamespot, it's useless. The purchaser will still need to shell out for an account to play on the network. Blizzard wants to ensure that anyone who plays Starcraft II pays Blizzard. Not a third-party retailer.
Seth
Re:and still (Score:5, Informative)
Troop boredom and depression during deployment in remote locations is one of the biggest problems that military commanders must deal with. They generally encourage any form of entertainment as long as it doesn't interfere with military duties.
In fact, if you have any old games you want to get rid of, go to www.anysoldier.com and I guarantee you can find thousands of enlisted men and women more than happy to take them off your hands.
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> What? You don't? So... you're expecting a commercial plane to allow you to pull out wifi or drape a bunch of CAT-5 everywhere to play games on the flight? What?!?
Delta have Wi-Fi equipped a lot of their planes, actually ( http://blog.delta.com/category/wi-fi/ [delta.com] ) and the new Boeing Dreamliner comes with networking as standard (although mostly it comes up as a security risk - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787#Computer_network_vulnerability [wikipedia.org] ).
> Okay, maybe more understandable than a plane, but if
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Furthermore, I don't know how it will work in SCII, but in SCI, you cannot host from within the same masqueraded subnet. Someone with an independent IP address needs to be the host. If it works the same in SCII, it will be really bad.
Finally
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Re:and still (Score:5, Interesting)
Playing in network environments not hooked up to the Internet much?
Wow, fanboy much?
The simple fact is that there are MANY times and places where LAN support is very helpful, if not outright required. Several other posters have enumerated the latter, but for the former, you need to consider scale.
Sure, if you have 4-6 people playing then maybe going over the Internet to Battle.net is an okay (if lame) solution. What about a group of 20? 50? 200? Blizzard has repeatedly said they want Starcraft II to be a serious e-sport contender, both in Asia and in the US/Europe. During the beta, people trying to organize big LAN-style game sessions have noted that their plans completely fell apart when they discovered that Battle.net limited the number of players per IP address to 12. This might have changed, but the fact that they instituted any limit should be telling.
To pull this off, they will be required to implement some form of LAN play, something they've already said they will do [bigdownload.com]:
"We will be addressing StarCraft II tournament functionality in a post launch patch to the game, soon after ship. This patch will include features to address the needs of location-based pro tournaments, but we have not discussed any specifics about tournament support beyond that."
Blizzard denies the rumors of a LAN-enabled "Professional Edition", but it sure sounds like that's the direction they're heading. On one hand Blizzard claims that "No LAN because Battle.net 2 is just so amazing we can't let anyone miss out!" and then on the other "Okay, LAN play is required but only high rollers get it, not the rest of you, you dirty pirates". Anyone who's played the beta knows how bad and lacking Battle.net 2 is. Yes, it's beta, but the final release is in less than 10 days. It's not like they're going to uncheck the "Battle.net sucks enabled" checkbox the day before.
I want to love Starcraft 2, but Blizzard-Activision is making it so hard :(
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What blizzard realized was that a significant part of the games played on starcraft and war3 were played between people who know each other.
It's far from being the majority but it's a significant amount.
If you let these people play on Lan, they do not connect to battle.net, so:
A. they are more independant and your power over their lessens.
B. You can't feed them with your advertising.
Ultimately I don't understand how this wasn't more stressed as
$10 mil per year (Score:3, Funny)
It only took them 10 years to release. If they'd released it 5 years ago, it would have only cost a fraction of that.
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Adding more developers only makes a project later. (Score:4, Interesting)
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Blizzard knows this, and thus they take their time. A lot of time they spend on their core values (gameplay first, commit to quality, embrace your inner geek, etc) requires constant communication, and adding people makes this worse -- communication channels increase geometrically as people are added to a project.
For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.
Not to mention that new employees require significant training, or else they'll introduce significant amount of bugs and flaws into a program or other creative effort. You can actually end up worse than you started if you have more bugs, gameplay issues, inconsistent storylines, and so forth to fix at the end of the day than the beginning.
This is called Brooks' Law, and was detailed in 1975 by Fred Brooks in the book 'The Mythical Man Month'. Wikipedia article is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law [wikipedia.org]
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...or maybe you should have read the link he included at the end for more details instead of making a ridiculous straw man.
Admittedly, the parent misquoted. He should have said, "You cannot add developers to a late project and make it release sooner". But if you had taken the time and ef
Re:$10 mil per year (Score:5, Funny)
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Whoosh!
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(I hope I'm not picking on someone with Asperger's or something...)
Expenses (Score:2, Flamebait)
Most of that money will have gone into graphics and marketing.
No wonder large companies have to create a top 10 game in order to get their investment back!
If they would settle for 20% less impressive graphics, I bet they'd save more than 50% on the bills. And then they wouldn't have to be so scared about piracy, either.
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Whatever money blizzards dumps into their graphics, its into the art, not into trying to cram more polygons on screen.
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I guess there was some pizza and mountain dew too.
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50% to salaries for a very large team (dev, artists, qa). About 20-25% for marketing. 10% or so for hardware (for battlenet around the world). 5% for pro voice actors. 10% management.
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50% to salaries for a very large team (dev, artists, qa). About 20-25% for marketing. 10% or so for hardware (for battlenet around the world). 5% for pro voice actors. 10% management.
+ overhead (offices, phones, internet, 'infrastructure, etc)....
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They've shown the commercial a few times, but in timeslots that are probably pretty expensive (one of the games in the NBA finals for example). I also saw ome some ads for it online when I was on a computer without some of my usual browser extensions
Pillars (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see... .... And what else?
Activision's seven pillars are most likely:
World of Warcraft
Unnamed Blizzard MMORPG
Diablo
StarCraft
Guitar/Band Hero
Call of Duty
They only have a few other franchises to work with.. the LEGO game series, Cabela's hunting games (lol), and Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
As far as I know their contract with Marvel is over, so they might not be able to produce another M:UA game.
None of these remaining franchises seem like 1 billion dollar winners, so what does that leave for the seventh pillar?
It's Lego (Score:2)
Re:Pillars (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you RTFA...
1. Starcraft
2. WoW
3. Diablo
4. Blizzard's "secret new MMO"
5. Bungie‘s unnannounced new IP <- You missed that one
6. Guitar Hero
7. Call of Duty
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I'm old and dense, so please help me: does 'IP' refer to 'intellectual property', or is it some game-specific acronym?
Perhaps he meant IPO?
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Yes, intellectual property. More specifically, "new IP" means a new setting/canon/gameplay/world/etc. For example, all Metroid games are Metroid IP (old 2D + newer 3D both), all Warcraft games are Warcraft IP, Mario games are Mario IP, etc. "Bungie's new IP" means a project by Bungie that isn't part of any project they've done yet--it's not a continuation of Halo, for example.
Re:Pillars (Score:4, Informative)
None of these remaining franchises seem like 1 billion dollar winners, so what does that leave for the seventh pillar?
Well its got to be one of:
Given that its a gaming company, I'd be going with Greed
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Bobby Kotick himself.
Hey, his quote in TFS doesn't appear to say that all pillars must be games.
100/3? (Score:2)
I assume they mean $100 million for the entire series (Wings of Liberty, Legacy of the Void, Heart of the Swarm), making it ~33 per game? After all, they're selling them at full price, and mentioned several times that each installment could stand on it's own. Seeing as they're doing this to brag, it seems odd they wouldn't mention that it was just Wings of Liberty if that was the case.
Not so great (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in the beta program, and I've got to say I didn't enjoy the game nearly as much as I did the original StarCraft. It's possible that I'm just outgrowing that kind of game, but I really just wasn't enjoying the gameplay so much.
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I found the gameplay to be great, but the attitudes of Battle.net players really turned me off. This is essentially the same reason I stopped playing WoW. The Blizzard gaming community as a whole may be large, but it is also comprised of many people with poor sportsmanship and overall poor attitude. I don't think any RealID forum plans (which have been rolled back) would have helped very much. Spoiled teenagers and socially maladjusted adults generally don't care about consequences.
The final straw in SC2 be
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Too fast (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in the beta program too and didn't enjoy it much either. I'd play a game or two and then quit for the evening, whereas with the original Starcraft I'd get sucked in and play for hours (often into the wee hours of the morning and miss out on sleep).
One problem I noticed is that the game moves too fast. The units do so much damage that they kill each other or buildings in mere seconds. There's no time to send reinforcements, cast spells, or even retreat. Well, maybe pro players with 600 APM can do that stuff, but for an average player the battles are over before you even get the alert that they've started.
menu (Score:2, Interesting)
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pretty much unanimously community thinks that bnet 2.0 is a hardcore fail, it doesn't offer features available 10 years ago in classic battle.net, like convenient means of communication between players or ability to play across region borders. What people get now looks like flash ridden XBoxLive imitation, infested with Facebook and people say you can actually feel lonely there with thousands of players. But hey, you can farm achievements!
That's what you get when your services are shaped primarily by Activi
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I'll probably still buy it just to play occasionally online with friends though...
I hope your friends live nearby because if you want to play with people from another region (Europe, US, Asia) then you need to buy a CD-Key for that region as well.
Just in case you were wondering why... (Score:2, Informative)
...you're gonna have to buy this game 3 times.
You're a sucker if you buy SC2. Go play something else. Go get League of Legends or something. Don't encourage this shit where you pay $50-60 a pop 2-3 times just to get an entire game.
Re:Just in case you were wondering why... (Score:5, Funny)
...you're gonna have to buy this game 3 times.
You're a sucker if you buy SC2. Go play something else. Go get League of Legends or something. Don't encourage this shit where you pay $50-60 a pop 2-3 times just to get an entire game.
Apparently you don't understand. It's very simple really. It's Starcraft. S-T-A-R-C-R-A-F-T. Everything else, such as life, liberty and pursuit of (any other kind of) happiness, is secondary.
(And no, I'm not a real fan, and I have no current plans to play or buy the game, just saying...)
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Last I heard each campaign of SC2 is going to be priced at the cost of a full game.
Half Life 2's "episodes" were short but at least they were priced at expansion pack costs. Not that they were worth it (speaking as someone who bought both).
Wow, $100000000 (Score:2)
Yeah, yeah, I know, small market share, not enough interest, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, ad infintitum, ad nausium.
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Give us battle net chat, lan play. (Score:2)
System requirements (Score:3, Insightful)
So, how is someone supposed to magically know if the GPU in his computer is better or worse than the GPUs listed for Starcraft II?
Seriously, Apple has used so few GPUs since they switched to intel, the least Blizzard could do is list all of the supported ones.
Where does the 9400M and the 320M fall in that list? The 320M is more powerful than the 9400M, so we can't even go by numbers alone. Stupid marketing departments with their crazy GPU names.
Re:System requirements (Score:4, Informative)
TFA: [blizzard.com]
"Mac Recommended System Requirements:....9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better"
Usually I'd agree, it can sometimes be hard to figure out if a 4890 is better than a 5750, etc, but in this case they made it pretty clear. A 9400M is not as fast as a 9600M, so while it'll play on minimum it isn't the recommended GPU.
FYI if you ever want to check just google "(BLANK) vs (BLANK)". Chances are you'll find a review comparing the two GPU unless one of them is so old it's not even worth comparing it with the other GPU.
Here's a great example: "PC Recommended System Requirements:... ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better"
So I googled: Radeon 3870 vs 4770 [google.com] and found this review [hwcompare.com] which shows the 4770 scoring 30%+ better framerates than the 3870.
No Download (Score:4, Informative)
My experience of this this of approach is unpleasant. While I talk about steam games, and while this is Battle.Net I am wary. Pre downloading then activating on the day of release for left 4 dead 2 was terrible. It probaly has something to do with time zones as the "27th" will occur a half day before for me(being in new zealand). On that day of release the sun rose, the shops opened and the copies were on the shelf. I was not able to activate for another 24 hours. Some NZ'ers could but not me.
I note battlenet say it is "activatable once it goes on sale in the US". 07/27/2010 10:00 AM PDT
NZ'ers and Australians, remember, copies will have been on the shelf for one day, if that affects your decision to download (BattleNet downloader 3 meg. Starcraft 2 client 8GB). Ports required are ports 3724, 6112, 6113, 6114, 4000 or 6881-6999. so if you are in a restricted environment you will get "Tracker Not Responding"
Re: (Score:2)
I agree about RealID. They only know my real name so I can pay them, and they want to show it to the entire internet?! Hopefully now that they've backed down about the forum thing, they'll rethink the whole concept. I'd like a global unique identifier over the whole internet, but it should NOT have any impact on my real life.
That said...
OMG a beta is far less polished than an expansion to an already released game that has been patched up over years! SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!
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I also call bullshit on the $100m figure. I bet there is a lot of 'Hollywood Accounting' going on there.
I also wonder how much it would be without all the cut-scene filler they seem to enjoy spending a fortune on
these days.
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10 years * ~12 developers at $80 000 each gets you close to the figure. Sure the salaries are probably a bit more varied, but there are most probably other costs involved.
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You're off by an order of magnitude, but 120 developers on a title like SC2 is not hard to fathom at all for anyone who has sat through a big-budget VG credits screen recently.
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By "these days", you mean every single game released by Blizzard since SC 1 back in 1998? The elaborate cut-scene always been what Blizz does. It isn't some new thing.
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Even WC1 had pre-rendered cut scenes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsBUAnb_NL8 [youtube.com]
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I would like to ask how much is advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why not? Music execs are notoriously bad at picking the music that will succeed. Publishers are bad at picking up the books that will succeed. Quite often Hollywood wastes money on a big flop.
As to games, remember Age of Conan?
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
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As to games, remember Age of Conan?
What's your point? For one thing, AoC is still around and kicking, including an upcoming expansion. As far as any of us knows, it may be a financial success by now, even if the player base has shrunk. For Another, AoC is a Funcom game, no relation of Blizzard/Activision. Which of course brings us to your next point...
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far
I think @gravos' sentiment, while badly worded, is correct. Blizzard seem to be really good at what they do and presumably the "cut-scene filler" will actually be something that helps sell th
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7 years, 100 employees, averages salary 100K works out to 70 million. That's probably a lowball for both the number of employees on the SC team and their average salary. Then add equipment, acting (voice) talent, marketing, production, management, and I don't find 100M surprising. Then again, I worked on the smaller D2 team, and I know what our burn rate was there.
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The linux requirements on their page are a bit ridiculous.. Dual Core 2.5 GHz and Ubuntu only? Jeeze... I'll wait for the fedora rpm thank you.
wtf ?
Which Linux requirements on what page ?
Starcraft II is natively playable on Ubuntu ? => *happy geek*
I though it was a total rumour !
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I'm sure they are putting money into marketing, sure. Also, I have reservations about what I've heard about this game's DRM and I'm waiting to see how this will be handled at launch.
However, there is absolutely no denying that a lot of work went into this game. A tremendous number of man hours and assets were involved. If you truly believe that this is nothing but marketing hype masking a shallow cheap production, then you are either delusional or have your head up your ass.
More than that... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait a minute, you were being sarcastic! Damnit, I guess I can't get a "whoosh" now that I've caught that. :(
Anyway, It's not just the #1 RTS of all time... it's the #4 Top Selling PC game of all time (according to this article on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
You bought up a point that's really bothered me. When the original was published, they were smart enough to allow for Spawned copies, so that only a certain number of players had to even own a legitimate copy. They didn't need cracks, just spawned a LAN only copy an
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Hmm, interesting, that has not been my experience at all. Perhaps the problem comes from dragging players who are far more biased toward FPS or RPG into playing an RTS. Not that battle.net has been doing any better in that regard lately, but I've found it to generally be impossible to balance teams completely on LAN play.