I’ll buy your cosmetics, pay for your seasons if you make at least eternal offline.
D4 offline will never happen. It’s simply the model that Blizzard uses now.
We’re lucky that D2R can be played offline.
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Least they took the veil off this time.
I remember the old reason for online-only was because of “piracy concerns”. Now it’s for constant new content.(granted they are actually doing this even if we don’t agree with the content itself, still better than the anti-piracy bit which didn’t work.)
Microsoft is cheating at the game and using their own cloud infrastructure to boost numbers internally. Clever girl.
It’s really both. Piracy drops to 0 and they can put out new content. D2 was really the pioneer here for Blizzard when they started Ladders and Ladder-only content.
Blizzard also gains 100% price control, elimination of a secondary used market that serves to only hurt their bottom line, and a nearly $0 distribution cost compared to a physical product. All digital is really the dream of every software company.
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Heh that just reminded me of another lie. The decrease of prices when companies go digital.
If it wasn’t for storefronts like steam and GOG, I would have put this off as complete false advertising.
Yeah it does so both but, looking at it from a players viewpoint, is it worth losing the ownership? That is a question right there that may not get a true answer.
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Wrong.
Back in the summer of 2011 when they first announced, that D3 will be online only, They weren’t openly stating, that piracy was a concern. The fiction they peddled was along the lines of “we want to prevent cheating and negative experiences”, referring to things of the past such as Open Battle Net in D2.
The irony was, that by forcing everyone online, they did expose people to cheating and negative experiences, that they would have avoided if there was an offline mode.
In an interview throughout the following years, one of the moro… I mean one of the developers, said something along the lines, that D2 should have been an online only game on release and never should have allowed for offline single player.
That was some utter nonsense and it would have killed the franchise, because for those who are old enough to remember, back in the year 2000 most households didn’t have internet connection (even if they did have a PC), and for those that did, the internet was still crap… even in the states.
It was only really the shills yapping and whining about “piracy” to other posters… on a forum, which required you to have a valid CD key in order to post. In other words lamers complaining about piracy to people, that clearly weren’t pirates. Yep, that was truly ridiculous.
And as to the whole issue with piracy – that’s a non-issue.
Do you think someone in his right mind would have bothered to pirate a craptastic game like D3?
What about D4? Do you think this game works as a 100% solo experience? I for one don’t think it does. It’s clearly built for you to have to interact with others.
So why would you pirate it, when you would end up unable to join battle net? Makes no sense.
And what about the attitude of gaming companies throughout the last 2 decades? Instead of you buying your own copy of the game, they claim you merely buy a license, akin to a ticket for a theme park… and they can kick you out for whatever reason.
To that I say… if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing!
Private servers. Games like Dragon’s Dogma Online still exist thanks to piracy.
Copyright law is complicated but this was always the truth. You never really did “own” anything. That crowd which humps on physical discs and VHS tapes all ignore the fine print that says you can’t distribute it because you don’t own the license. Owning a disc never gave you rights to the IP.
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Awesome! But clearly I was talking about D3.
Obviously the end user doesn’t own the IP. I don’t believe any reasonable person would say that. That was never the issue.
The crowd which “humps on physical discs and VHS tapes” never claimed to own IP, but the company could not deprive them of what they already purchased.
The irony is:
with the morally bankrupt attitude of many companies, I feel more justified to pirate than ever;
but sadly with the quality (or lack of such) of many current things, be it movies, tv show or games, I don’t feel there’s anything I would pirate… or buy…
Yeah, they could. Let’s say that you bought a physical cartridge of Pokemon Blue. Your Gameboy is long gone but you own the cartridge and by some strange miracle you have a receipt for purchase and it isn’t faded. You anticipated this ownership apocalypse. You find out that you can download the rom from somewhere that isn’t the official Nintendo website. So because you bought the game at some point in time is it legal for you to access the rom, from the game you bought eons ago, via a channel that you didn’t actually buy it on?
We have court precedent. This isn’t a truly hypothetical case. Still, what do you think the answer is in the eyes of the law?
The issue is not that you wouldn’t steal it, but that others might, and whilst you don’t like D3, millions did, and thousands still do, just like music and anything other form of media. “We” are, sadly, not all “you”, so clearly “our” tastes fall below but even then that doesn’t stave off the issue. Not to say that I support companies in their power grabs over their own IPs: Nintendo is a silly thing at times with how tightly they control theirs, to the point where they won’t let people use them in fundraisers for great causes without proper pre-approval, and there does need to be some better limits on copyrighting as Disney has completely abused it with their idiot vault idea.
But maybe they just make things you don’t like so that you won’t steal them since copyright laws were clearly written with you in mind. They’ve succeeded.