To Nickel and Dime
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008Blizzard realized our worst fears: World of Microtransactions. They decided to start milking the franchise to exahustion, with lots of contents to be available as add-on commercial services.
It will start with new appeareance options available only to people willing to pay for it, and it will stop, well, they didn’t say it will stop at all, to be honest. Wonderful: crippling for money the game you already pay a monthly fee and hefty retail prices to play. Looking at the less than enthusiast fanbase reactions I guess Activision got the MMO commercial models wrong: the fusion of two different models is not very smart, DLC on consoles proved it and publishers adjusted the pricing and aims of commercial add-ons accordingly to not leave with lots of pissed customers.
The risk is high: Blizzard took an already conservative reaction against WAR, they basically are pretending it don’t even exist, but the sad truth is that, marketing and tear-inducing quests (in WOW, lol!) aside, the latest iterations of WOW where a lot of more of the same and the new one will only extend the grind and piss off existing players (that, if you’re not under a rock, in Europe are leaving in droves due to boredom). Getting ready to battle more innovative games may be very hard for Blizzard, social phenomenon or not (just look at what is Second Life today!).
The move to let people buy three different copies of Starcraft to play the whole game is just another little money draining maneuver. The problem is that, corporate finances aside, these tactics often leaves IPs as a pale shades of themselves, often tainted by a bad reputation.
I have a bad feeling what it will be needed to play Diablo 3, let’s hope for the best.
