Battle.net 2.0 subscription fee?

[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