Starcraft 2 Special edition is a wee bit pricey.

[killermofo]

Let's take the extra $10 by let's say 10 million copies.. thats an extra $100million revenue
would you pay your game developers, artists, programmers an extra $250k+ each to develop the next 2 expansions?

I would but..
would Activision aka Bobby "the apple worm" Kotick
probably not..

Now instead of 10million copies make it 200million worldwide.

Question: Is there platform royalties for PC?

[newcomplex]

Games certainly are more expensive. Development costs, and inflation have had an effect since 2000, but prices should remain constant because through a vastly expanded audience, the gaming industry has also grown tremendously since then, matching an exceeding the rising costs.

http://www.pcgamingalliance.org/

PC gaming has received the most stable growth. While it has not had the explosive growth in popularity consoles received, they proved more resilient then them, not suffering the same general decline they had received in the recent recession.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10289207-235.html

Certain things become more expensive through inflation when their respective industry stops growing correlation with currency inflation. This is not the case within the PC gaming industry, which has shown nothing but growth-Growth outpacing the actual rate of currency inflation, throughout the last ten years.

This is made even more laughable by the fact that no only do you consumers act contrary to your own interests and accept a unnecessary price hike, but you actively defend it. A price hike which is correlative to that found in most industries who have seen stable returns in their investments, and seek to increase the profit margin.

[Moradon]

Okay, Nicol, accepting your arguments of games being more expensive (as an actual game developer, I disagree, but I'm a small operation as opposed to a big one and I therefore see things differently) and accepting your arguments that inflation will raise all game prices eventually...

EVEN if I accepted all of that (which I don't entirely, by the way) we have here an excellent example of "denialism and intellectual sloth."

What, exactly, are we getting with SC2? We're getting a 3D StarCraft that does not play vastly different from the first one (despite 10 years of development) and a game that has no support for LAN. How is this, at all, different from MW2? There are no dedicated servers. There is no LAN. We have to wait for expansions to even get the full story. We have to deal with a BNet2 that will not move the PC gaming scene forward one iota, instead of having choices to get it through Steam or Impulse. We are forced to be online every single time we want to play the game.

And on top of that, we now have to pay $60 for it? We are paying Blizzard, and by extension Activision, for them taking things away from us. How can we, as gamers, stand idly by and watch this happen?

But unfortunately, as newcomplex says, what point does any of this make? Gone are the days where "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Nowadays it's more akin to good men CAN'T do anything, even if they wanted to.

(BTW, Nicol, your claim that PC is by definition multi-platform is laughable. If you follow industry standards (openGL, DX, to name a few) there is very little coding, if any, that you need to do to make a Windows product work on Intel versus AMD or nVidia versus ATi. You seriously need to do some more work making games if you believe that. It is a dozen times more difficult to try and make a PS3 game work on the X360 and on the PC than it is just to get it to work on PC/Mac. Trust me...I'm making a game and I went through preliminary work on doing it for PS3 as well. I dropped that second part almost immediately.)

Okay, now you're just being melodramatic.

You're getting a sequel to one of the greatest RTS games of all time, with a completely revamped single-player mode, an incredibly deep skill-based multiplayer, the most advanced map editor in the industry where players can get paid for making maps, several of what I'm sure will be the best cinematic experiences in an RTS, and an online system that will be sure to set the standard for games to come. I honestly don't know why you think Bnet 2.0 will advance nothing. The ladder system alone already trounces everything I've seen before in a game, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what it will have.

Remember that Blizzard is still a company of people who love games. Stop acting as if they're evil, bloodsucking aliens out to make you suffer. I mean seriously, when you start bringing up quotes like "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," then you're taking things way too seriously.

[Kaiser]

Okay, now you're just being melodramatic.

You're getting a sequel to one of the greatest RTS games of all time, with a completely revamped single-player mode, an incredibly deep skill-based multiplayer, the most advanced map editor in the industry where players can get paid for making maps, several of what I'm sure will be the best cinematic experiences in an RTS, and an online system that will be sure to set the standard for games to come. I honestly don't know why you think Bnet 2.0 will advance nothing. The ladder system alone already trounces everything I've seen before in a game, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what it will have.

Remember that Blizzard is still a company of people who love games. Stop acting as if they're evil, bloodsucking aliens out to make you suffer. I mean seriously, when you start bringing up quotes like "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," then you're taking things way too seriously.

1. Hacks are already out for Starcraft II.
2. Bobby Kotick is a greedy whore.
3. You know he has influence on Blizzard and their marketing,pricing,etc.

[Moradon]

1. Hacks are already out for Starcraft II.
2. Bobby Kotick is a greedy whore.
3. You know he has influence on Blizzard and their marketing,pricing,etc.

And this is relevant, how?

[killermofo]

Quotes from: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60451

Occassionally villified Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has made another revelation bound to spark some interesting conversation, admitting that "the goal that I had [at Activision]...about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."

The head of Activision Blizzard--one of, if not the, largest game publishers, known for such hits as Guitar Hero, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft--noted that the company's incentive program "really rewards profit and nothing else," adding that "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" are used to keep employees "focused on the deep depression."

Describing the company's attitude as "a real culture of thrift," Kotick explained that "you have studio heads who five years ago didn't know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO's office pretty regularly."

As for Activision's future, the CEO said to "expect many of our products to be playable independent of a console," with GameSpot's writeup explaining:

[Kotick said] he'd been impressed with media hub functionalities shown by 1080p TVs that let users stream content from their PCs.

[newcomplex]

and this is relevant, how?

฿Q฿฿¥ IS THE FACE OF THE DEVIL HE WILL EAT YOUR BABIES AFTER BATHING IN MONEY.

tru story.

[killermofo]

฿Q฿฿¥ IS THE FACE OF THE DEVIL HE WILL EAT YOUR BABIES AFTER BATHING IN MONEY.

tru story.

[Xyvik]

You're getting a sequel to one of the greatest RTS games of all time,

Sorry, StarCraft is only number 4 on my list. I do not worship Blizzard.

with a completely revamped single-player mode

True. Perhaps the only truly unique thing here.

an incredibly deep skill-based multiplayer

HA! HAHAHAHA! It will degenerate into the same rush-fest, 2/3-unit matches that the first one did. Unless they do something really crazy with their balancing, it will still be prone to early rushes, cheese, and games that barely last 8 minutes. There is little "skill" here, at least strategic skill.

the most advanced map editor in the industry where players can get paid for making maps,

Which will have to prove itself. How long do you honestly think it will be before you have to pay to play certain ladder maps?

several of what I'm sure will be the best cinematic experiences in an RTS,

If there is one thing Blizzard can do right, it is their cinematics. But are cinematics worth $10 more than standard? Not to me.

and an online system that will be sure to set the standard for games to come. I honestly don't know why you think Bnet 2.0 will advance nothing. The ladder system alone already trounces everything I've seen before in a game, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what it will have.

There's this wonderful little program. You may have heard of it. It's called STEAM. It allows you to chat with friends through hundreds of different games. It gives you awesome deals, it doesn't require you to be online 24/7, and it can be run successfully in the background, even if you want to just chat. The only thing BNet2 has for it is the ladder system. And if you're not a pro player (something you might want to note: pros make up a very small percentage of players) then why would you even care?

I mean seriously, when you start bringing up quotes like "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," then you're taking things way too seriously.

Ever heard of Bobby Kotick? Yeah, he runs the company that owns Blizzard. Evil is no longer the days of blood-sucking aliens, because we have plenty of blood-sucking humans around to do the job. Call me melodramatic if you wish; I am an author, I get paid to be dramatic. But I also call things as I see them.

[Moradon]

HA! HAHAHAHA! It will degenerate into the same rush-fest, 2/3-unit matches that the first one did. Unless they do something really crazy with their balancing, it will still be prone to early rushes, cheese, and games that barely last 8 minutes. There is little "skill" here, at least strategic skill.

Ugh, can't take you seriously after this little gem. In that case I'll just end this here. Your skepticism is far too extreme than what is necessary.