Battle.net 2.0 subscription fee?

[EverBlue]

http://www.destructoid.com/in-the-future-b...ey-107378.phtml

I honestly hope this isn't true at all. I can see Blizzard suffering massively.
First splitting SC2 into three games... Then charging money to play online?
:nono:

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[Orin]

Blizzard sold their souls to Activision, correct? Seems like since they did that they've been pulling idiot moves like this.

[Drake]

This, if confirmed, would definitely mean I would lose all interest in Diablo 3. I only played 1 and 2 for the Battle.net multiplayer (as single-player games they were OK, but not great), and I have better things to spend money on than any game subscriptions.

On the other hand, people have developed software for hosting private bnet servers. Blizzard doesn't like them, it doesn't like them at all, and discussion/advertising of them has been banned on planetdiablo.com. But if some people got some working and populated servers running for D3 at some point, then I might regain interest. But Blizzard would try and shut them all down.

[ivr56]

After the colossal failure that was once a promising game, World of Warcraft, Blizzard has had to revaluate its existence and make some tough spending decisions.

They say World of Warcraft is a failure?
They got 11 Million Subscribers Worldwide. How is that a failure?
More subscribers then any MMO I think.
If they make Battle.net a fee to play, then they will just loose money and what Drake said more and more will look to private servers as a solution.

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[Drake]

They say World of Warcraft is a failure?
They got 11 Million Subscribers Worldwide. How is that a failure?
More subscribers then any MMO I think.

That was sarcasm. It doesn't always translate well over the internet without [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tags.

[Blodo]

This is actually only partially true, even if it is a definite encroachment on forcing people to start paying cash for online services on non-MMO games (which however you look at it is a bit of a business breakthrough, and will no doubt catch on at other companies if it is successful). According to a different source:

So Julian (Jay) Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?

Wow, that's an evil way of putting it. Julian's turning into a business guy on me. Here's the way I would put it. We're definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game. It's clearly not an MMO, so it's not appropriate to do a business model like that. The way we approach all of our games now, is we come up with what we think is a great game, and then we wrap the appropriate business model around it. If that's just a box price, then that's that.

With Battle.Net we're definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We're not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We're not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.

Source: http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellfo...ed-As-Reference

[JakeSG]

Christ, it seems that Blizzard's all in it for the money these days. Their games used to be WTFAwesome, but ever since WoW the company as a whole seems to have been going downhill. From what I can tell, none of their previous games, even WC3 TFT have no tech support or moderation whatsoever. Battle.net is a free for all, gentlemen. If you're brave enough to use it, you're on your own.

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For the Core.