We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support (really??? no clan support still? no tournament support?) It's retarded, and what we always get thrown back when we complain is "we'll get to it eventually." I'm calling bullshit on blizzard, they're just raking in the cash and sitting on their hands because no one is contesting their spot as "king of RTS creators." Recently I've been helping CecilSunkure playtest his game found here. This game was made with 4 people in about one business quarter, not working full hours and not being paid at all, and it's ready to be distributed on tablets... And these guys are still in school for programming! Blizzard has TONS of money from WoW, TONS of talent, and TONS of time! they're literally restricted by nothing that Cecil's team is restricted by, yet Cecil managed to pump out a fully functional game, so why hasn't anyone done this for the RTS genre?
SC2 won't last on the competitive scene like BW did, the game isn't enough to carry its shitty interface and features, not to mention Blizzard's dickishness in regards to dealing with KESPA. It's already dying (never really took off) in Korea, which means there's truly a market for an RTS king. While I was contemplating this today, I ran a couple of numbers through my head to see if it was just plain too expensive for startup companies to challenge blizzard. Here's the fruitions of my contemplations and analysis of the data.
I created a spreadsheet predicting the 6 year life cycle of a game using the net present value method (it would take a while to explain why, so if you're curious PM me or better yet go wikipedia it). I created a model that'll be able to calculate the cost of producing and sustaining a game, accounting for salaries and advertising. It also takes into account sales volume (accounting for decreases in sales over time) as well as money paid from kespa as licensing fees (accounting for viewership growth over the next 12 quarters) (from year 3 onward until year 6 where the model ends). The numbers I used to my model are shown below (they're fully changable if you don't think they're accurate, I'll upload the spreadsheet so that you can play with it), the Kespa licensing fees are the money Kespa pays my development firm per viewer. The growth is growth in Kespa's viewership over the quarters. Here is the following information for each year (assuming the base case of only $1 per viewer from Kespa).
Variables involved
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Here's the cashflow/DCF calculations (required return of 14%)
Here's a graph representing the total discounted profits of the firm for the initial 6 years at a $1 licensing fee
Here's a graph representing the total discounted profits of the firm for the initial 6 years at a $5 licensing fee
As you can see it's drastically different depending on how much kespa would pay per viewer to broadcast our new game, it's also significantly different depending on how much you charge consumers for your title (both of these graphs only charge 5 dollars per copy! compared to Blizzard's 60 dollars..) They're definitely beatable, depending on a few things.
1. You have to actually have the support of the community and Korea.. communications with KESPA (or some broadcasting community) must actually go well. 2. You must LISTEN to your community or the title will flop just like SC2 has. 3. You need some way to sustain continuous customer support (a fee from the consumers, in my model kespa pays the firm for viewers but a pay to play model would be similar [although it removes the chance for eventually broadcasting to poor countries because no one there will buy/ p2p/ watch your game..]). 4. The game has to actually sell lol
Here's the link to the spread sheet on excel, I'll email/upload upon request.
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
updated all figures for salary decreases and advertising increases
Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
I support this too. Anyways, nice to see numbers that destroy my faith in SC2. Or not. It was at least eye opening.
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
it's ridiculous because blizzard is demanding $15 per viewer from Kespa (per quarter) for the SC2 PL, so if 25% of the korean population watches it they'll gross 150,000,000 usd per quarter in licensing revenue...
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
it's ridiculous because blizzard is demanding $15 per viewer from Kespa (per quarter) for the SC2 PL, so if 25% of the korean population watches it they'll gross 150,000,000 usd per quarter in licensing revenue...
Because 20 programmers (and I suspect you'd need more...) is nowhere the main cost of development for a game like Starcraft. You'd need a whole bunch of artists, game designers, voice actors, sound effects people etc... to have anything near competitive.
On April 25 2012 08:37 netherh wrote: Is this just sustaining a game after release?
Because 20 programmers (and I suspect you'd need more...) is nowhere the main cost of development for a game like Starcraft. You'd need a whole bunch of artists, game designers, voice actors, sound effects people etc... to have anything near competitive.
naw man these numbers i pulled out of my ass are all pure profit and surely a large corporation has the same costs as a startup with 4 programmers
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
it's ridiculous because blizzard is demanding $15 per viewer from Kespa (per quarter) for the SC2 PL, so if 25% of the korean population watches it they'll gross 150,000,000 usd per quarter in licensing revenue...
It really goes to show who's doing the business. And its Activision, I'm afraid.
On April 25 2012 08:37 netherh wrote: Is this just sustaining a game after release?
Because 20 programmers (and I suspect you'd need more...) is nowhere the main cost of development for a game like Starcraft. You'd need a whole bunch of artists, game designers, voice actors, sound effects people etc... to have anything near competitive.
the first 3 years are pre release and the later 3 are post (listed in variables). I don't know the exact number of programmers that would be needed, but even if you raised it up to 40 programmers you would still have a positive NPV at $5 retail with $2 licensing from kespa (all else the same)
On April 25 2012 08:37 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote:
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
it's ridiculous because blizzard is demanding $15 per viewer from Kespa (per quarter) for the SC2 PL, so if 25% of the korean population watches it they'll gross 150,000,000 usd per quarter in licensing revenue...
Is PL even profitable for KESPA now??
yeah, they make quite a bit on advertising (assuming it's similar to the US)
On April 25 2012 08:41 3FFA wrote: Read it all. Nicely done, but why no advertising costs? And exactly how many copies have to be sold for a profit?
edit: Also, I like how blizz charges $15 for BW.
Even if you raise advertising to 3mil per quarter post release, you still get a positive NPV at $2 per viewer from KESPA. i dunno the break even quantity, I would have to retool the model because it's based off of profits coming from kespa not really from sales volume.
On April 25 2012 08:46 d3_crescentia wrote: are you seriously putting programmer pay at $200,000 per year?
oh shit you're right lol, i guess it should be 12,500 per quarter, my mistake!
There might be something wrong with how Blizzard is being run internally, because they have been ridiculously incompetent.
Consider that the D3 producer left just a month or two ago, before launch! And of course how long D3 has been delayed.
And of course how poor SC2 has been so far.
I think part of the issue is Blizzard is no longer king. They used to be able to put out a game, get great sales, and keep mindshare. But there is easily 10times if not more competition these days for attention. There's a lot of free to play games, games on different non-pc devices etc etc. So Blizzard can still rake in sales, but their same old tricks won't keep people's attention anymore. No one needs UMS maps. There's Steam games, DOTA, LOL, and tons of other stuff to play. It's not 1998 where outside of BNET and CS there were no other multiplayer games. War3 was the last of that period.
2012 is different from 1998 and different from 2004. I don't think they understand that.
If it was really this simple there would be a quality RTS released in the past decade. I can't think of a franchise that hasn't gone to shit in the past years ^_^
On April 25 2012 09:17 Blitzkrieg0 wrote: If it was really this simple there would be a quality RTS released in the past decade. I can't think of a franchise that hasn't gone to shit in the past years ^_^
Idk, valve continues to make sense. I wonder if they will ever release their own RTS...
On April 25 2012 09:17 Blitzkrieg0 wrote: If it was really this simple there would be a quality RTS released in the past decade. I can't think of a franchise that hasn't gone to shit in the past years ^_^
I don't think it's simple, it's just financially feasible assuming you can get some P2P (even if it's just .33 cents/month like my model) to release a free to play game that actually supports the community instead of the BS that is sc2
(i have no idea how to make a game, i just ran through the prospect of doing it)
These numbers are all over the place. A couple small examples.
Kespa is going to give you 1,000,000 your first quarter when you've sold 250,000 copies. Someone there is getting fired for signing that contract. Your sales go from 250,000 to 180,000 in the second quarter. You would be very optimistic to say your sales will go from 250,000 to 125,000.
What's with the downsizing in Y4? You'll also need support staff to provide that great customer service you mention. Also, you'll have a hard time retaining good devs for $60k a year unless you're also giving equity. I also think your sales figures and licensing fees are overly optimistic.
There's room for startups in the game industry -- I don't think anyone's doubting that -- but it's a lot harder than your numbers would imply.
On April 25 2012 09:26 GogoKodo wrote: These numbers are all over the place. A couple small examples.
Kespa is going to give you 1,000,000 your first quarter when you've sold 250,000 copies. Someone there is getting fired for signing that contract. Your sales go from 250,000 to 180,000 in the second quarter. You would be very optimistic to say your sales will go from 250,000 to 125,000.
sales go from 150,000 (10% of sc2 day1 sales) to 75,000, and continue to drop by 50% from then on. as far as the licensing, i think if the advertising was successful then kespa would be willing to pay a lot more than 1mil to get out of dealing with blizzard (assuming this new project is accepted by the korean population
On April 25 2012 09:29 Melchior wrote: What's with the downsizing in Y4? You'll also need support staff to provide that great customer service you mention. Also, you'll have a hard time retaining good devs for $60k a year unless you're also giving equity. I also think your sales figures and licensing fees are overly optimistic.
There's room for startups in the game industry -- I don't think anyone's doubting that -- but it's a lot harder than your numbers would imply.
I disagree.. i think with 300,000 in advertising per quarter along with community interaction it would be possible to achieve these sales figures. as far as kespa not paying us, it could easily be replaced by a 1 dollar per quarter fee on consumers.
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
it's ridiculous because blizzard is demanding $15 per viewer from Kespa (per quarter) for the SC2 PL, so if 25% of the korean population watches it they'll gross 150,000,000 usd per quarter in licensing revenue...
Is there a source for that $15/viewer figure? Would like to read it.
On April 25 2012 09:17 Blitzkrieg0 wrote: If it was really this simple there would be a quality RTS released in the past decade. I can't think of a franchise that hasn't gone to shit in the past years ^_^
I don't think it's simple, it's just financially feasible assuming you can get some P2P (even if it's just .33 cents/month like my model) to release a free to play game that actually supports the community instead of the BS that is sc2
(i have no idea how to make a game, i just ran through the prospect of doing it)
Anything is financially feasible when your numbers are made up and have no backing.
I'll just make a forum for your awesome game, Endymion's King RTS. First quarter I guess I'll have 15000 active viewers giving me ad revenue of $0.50 per user/day so I'm pulling in $7500 revenue a day. My written content will all be user submitted and I'll also hire hot_bid at $1000/day and I'll use the rest of my revenue to start a pro Endymion's King RTS team which will win the first EKTRS Star League pulling sponsor attention. So we'll get sponsors which will recoup the cost of hardware for my team and give my forum even more active viewers in the second quarter! teamliquid better watch out!
On April 25 2012 08:28 Rkie wrote: Cool numbers. Seeing stuff like this always impresses me because it shows just how greedy companies can get. As soon as you start making money, you have your fanbase, so take advantage of it imo. I am going to go play with some of the numbers later to see what happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
I support this.
it's ridiculous because blizzard is demanding $15 per viewer from Kespa (per quarter) for the SC2 PL, so if 25% of the korean population watches it they'll gross 150,000,000 usd per quarter in licensing revenue...
Is there a source for that $15/viewer figure? Would like to read it.
On April 25 2012 09:17 Blitzkrieg0 wrote: If it was really this simple there would be a quality RTS released in the past decade. I can't think of a franchise that hasn't gone to shit in the past years ^_^
I don't think it's simple, it's just financially feasible assuming you can get some P2P (even if it's just .33 cents/month like my model) to release a free to play game that actually supports the community instead of the BS that is sc2
(i have no idea how to make a game, i just ran through the prospect of doing it)
Anything is financially feasible when your numbers are made up and have no backing.
I'll just make a forum for your awesome game, Endymion's King RTS. First quarter I guess I'll have 15000 active viewers giving me ad revenue of $0.50 per user/day so I'm pulling in $7500 revenue a day. My written content will all be user submitted and I'll also hire hot_bid at $1000/day and I'll use the rest of my revenue to start a pro Endymion's King RTS team which will win the first EKTRS Star League pulling sponsor attention. So we'll get sponsors which will recoup the cost of hardware for my team and give my forum even more active viewers in the second quarter! teamliquid better watch out!
considering most companies charge 45 times what I'm projecting for MMOs, on top of an upfront fee for the actual game, I think my numbers are pretty accurate for a projection..
On April 25 2012 09:26 GogoKodo wrote: These numbers are all over the place. A couple small examples.
Kespa is going to give you 1,000,000 your first quarter when you've sold 250,000 copies. Someone there is getting fired for signing that contract. Your sales go from 250,000 to 180,000 in the second quarter. You would be very optimistic to say your sales will go from 250,000 to 125,000.
sales go from 150,000 (10% of sc2 day1 sales) to 75,000, and continue to drop by 50% from then on. as far as the licensing, i think if the advertising was successful then kespa would be willing to pay a lot more than 1mil to get out of dealing with blizzard (assuming this new project is accepted by the korean population
I guess your numbers may not be presented very well. You might consider hiring an accountant and including that in your figures.
I see, Price 10$. I see, Sales Revenue $2,500,000 in Y4Q1. Unless I'm reading something wrong.
Also, regardless of all that selling 150,000 copies of a game in a day is incredibly difficult.
On April 25 2012 09:26 GogoKodo wrote: These numbers are all over the place. A couple small examples.
Kespa is going to give you 1,000,000 your first quarter when you've sold 250,000 copies. Someone there is getting fired for signing that contract. Your sales go from 250,000 to 180,000 in the second quarter. You would be very optimistic to say your sales will go from 250,000 to 125,000.
sales go from 150,000 (10% of sc2 day1 sales) to 75,000, and continue to drop by 50% from then on. as far as the licensing, i think if the advertising was successful then kespa would be willing to pay a lot more than 1mil to get out of dealing with blizzard (assuming this new project is accepted by the korean population
I guess your numbers may not be presented very well. You might consider hiring an accountant and including that in your figures.
I see, Price 10$. I see, Sales Revenue $2,500,000 in Y4Q1. Unless I'm reading something wrong.
Also, regardless of all that selling 150,000 copies of a game in a day is incredibly difficult.
you're reading it right, I don't think 150,000 in the first quarter is too off though, lots of indie games have out sold that Q1 (and this isn't really an indie game with 20 fully employed developers)
also why are you so hostile... my numbers are presented correctly, if there's anything incorrect it's the optimistic projections not my formatting
third edit, even with 0 sales the NPV is still positive from the quarterly income (be it from kespa or subscription based)
On April 25 2012 09:02 architecture wrote: There might be something wrong with how Blizzard is being run internally, because they have been ridiculously incompetent.
Consider that the D3 producer left just a month or two ago, before launch! And of course how long D3 has been delayed.
And of course how poor SC2 has been so far.
I think part of the issue is Blizzard is no longer king. They used to be able to put out a game, get great sales, and keep mindshare. But there is easily 10times if not more competition these days for attention. There's a lot of free to play games, games on different non-pc devices etc etc. So Blizzard can still rake in sales, but their same old tricks won't keep people's attention anymore. No one needs UMS maps. There's Steam games, DOTA, LOL, and tons of other stuff to play. It's not 1998 where outside of BNET and CS there were no other multiplayer games. War3 was the last of that period.
2012 is different from 1998 and different from 2004. I don't think they understand that.
Let's not fucking kid ourselves... rose-tinted glasses for BW aside, SC2 itself is a fantastic game and will only get better. Sure, the UI of Bnet 2.0 has a ways to go, but the gameplay is great.
However, I wonder too if there's some stifling of voices/ideas going on inside Blizz HQ. They are s l o w to make any moves (even announcements or communication with the community) in the public domain, and my cynicism makes me suspect that there's an inflated bureaucracy at work. Things just don't happen, or they happen months (years in the case of Bnet 2.0) after the best impact could have been made.
I still have all my sentiments attached to Blizzard right now and I'm relatively optimistic about them (eventually) making the right decisions for the game, but they aren't exactly making all the right moves in all the right places at the moment. We'll see what happens in the next few years.
On April 25 2012 09:26 GogoKodo wrote: These numbers are all over the place. A couple small examples.
Kespa is going to give you 1,000,000 your first quarter when you've sold 250,000 copies. Someone there is getting fired for signing that contract. Your sales go from 250,000 to 180,000 in the second quarter. You would be very optimistic to say your sales will go from 250,000 to 125,000.
sales go from 150,000 (10% of sc2 day1 sales) to 75,000, and continue to drop by 50% from then on. as far as the licensing, i think if the advertising was successful then kespa would be willing to pay a lot more than 1mil to get out of dealing with blizzard (assuming this new project is accepted by the korean population
I guess your numbers may not be presented very well. You might consider hiring an accountant and including that in your figures.
I see, Price 10$. I see, Sales Revenue $2,500,000 in Y4Q1. Unless I'm reading something wrong.
Also, regardless of all that selling 150,000 copies of a game in a day is incredibly difficult.
you're reading it right, I don't think 150,000 in the first quarter is too off though, lots of indie games have out sold that Q1 (and this isn't really an indie game with 20 fully employed developers)
also why are you so hostile... my numbers are presented correctly, if there's anything incorrect it's the optimistic projections not my formatting
third edit, even with 0 sales the NPV is still positive from the quarterly income (be it from kespa or subscription based)
The numbers you are saying in these replies don't seem to match up with the numbers I'm seeing in your pictures. Y4Q1, 250,000 sales, Q2 180,000 sales, Q3 160,250 sales etc.
Sorry about sounding hostile. I'd rather my tone somehow convey that this whole thing is just silly.
On April 25 2012 09:02 architecture wrote: There might be something wrong with how Blizzard is being run internally, because they have been ridiculously incompetent.
Consider that the D3 producer left just a month or two ago, before launch! And of course how long D3 has been delayed.
And of course how poor SC2 has been so far.
I think part of the issue is Blizzard is no longer king. They used to be able to put out a game, get great sales, and keep mindshare. But there is easily 10times if not more competition these days for attention. There's a lot of free to play games, games on different non-pc devices etc etc. So Blizzard can still rake in sales, but their same old tricks won't keep people's attention anymore. No one needs UMS maps. There's Steam games, DOTA, LOL, and tons of other stuff to play. It's not 1998 where outside of BNET and CS there were no other multiplayer games. War3 was the last of that period.
2012 is different from 1998 and different from 2004. I don't think they understand that.
Let's not fucking kid ourselves... rose-tinted glasses for BW aside, SC2 itself is a fantastic game and will only get better. Sure, the UI of Bnet 2.0 has a ways to go, but the gameplay is great.
However, I wonder too if there's some stifling of voices/ideas going on inside Blizz HQ. They are s l o w to make any moves (even announcements or communication with the community) in the public domain, and my cynicism makes me suspect that there's an inflated bureaucracy at work. Things just don't happen, or they happen months (years in the case of Bnet 2.0) after the best impact could have been made.
I still have all my sentiments attached to Blizzard right now and I'm relatively optimistic about them (eventually) making the right decisions for the game, but they aren't exactly making all the right moves in all the right places at the moment. We'll see what happens in the next few years.
This. Starcraft 2 as a game is good, the battle.net UI is obviously bad and needs to be redone. Blizzard hired a new battle.net leader unless I am mistaken and hopefully we can get clan support and what not.
On April 25 2012 09:26 GogoKodo wrote: These numbers are all over the place. A couple small examples.
Kespa is going to give you 1,000,000 your first quarter when you've sold 250,000 copies. Someone there is getting fired for signing that contract. Your sales go from 250,000 to 180,000 in the second quarter. You would be very optimistic to say your sales will go from 250,000 to 125,000.
sales go from 150,000 (10% of sc2 day1 sales) to 75,000, and continue to drop by 50% from then on. as far as the licensing, i think if the advertising was successful then kespa would be willing to pay a lot more than 1mil to get out of dealing with blizzard (assuming this new project is accepted by the korean population
I guess your numbers may not be presented very well. You might consider hiring an accountant and including that in your figures.
I see, Price 10$. I see, Sales Revenue $2,500,000 in Y4Q1. Unless I'm reading something wrong.
Also, regardless of all that selling 150,000 copies of a game in a day is incredibly difficult.
you're reading it right, I don't think 150,000 in the first quarter is too off though, lots of indie games have out sold that Q1 (and this isn't really an indie game with 20 fully employed developers)
also why are you so hostile... my numbers are presented correctly, if there's anything incorrect it's the optimistic projections not my formatting
third edit, even with 0 sales the NPV is still positive from the quarterly income (be it from kespa or subscription based)
The numbers you are saying in these replies don't seem to match up with the numbers I'm seeing in your pictures. Y4Q1, 250,000 sales, Q2 180,000 sales, Q3 160,250 sales etc.
Sorry about sounding hostile. I'd rather my tone somehow convey that this whole thing is just silly.
You don't sound hostile at all. I totally understand your tone.
you may need to update the page, i changed some of them about an hour ago, here's what i'm seeing (q1 150,000, q2 75,000)
Ah I see those numbers now. It was difficult to discern because you don't have any labeling.
Your estimates are still wacky though.
I guess the real point I'm trying to get across is that your post doesn't really present any kind of interesting information. We know that games can be financially feasible already. You've basically started at the end point of having good numbers and used it to prove that a game could be made provided you get those good numbers. We could take my silly example of starting a forum again. If we take teamliquid's numbers as a currently successful website and then use those to say, "look, we can make a starcraft focused esports site work!" it's not very interesting. Yes, that can be done, but it doesn't account for so many factors and it's just giving us information we already know, that there is a currently successful starcraft focused esports site.
Your numbers pretty much have you making the indie hit of the decade. Amnesia sold just over 400k and that's with being on sale multiple times and with dozens of viral videos on youtube. A multiplayer-only RTS isn't going to sell as much. Then you have to actually reverse situation of small eSports games and get the league to pay you to run your game instead of you paying them. You won't actually support your game with 5 employees when you have to do antihack, server admining, customer support, tournament relations, patches... On top of all that, 20 guys won't make something as good as SC2 in 3 years.
Although the most recent one is from 2009 i would urge everybody to open that one and go to page 34, the consolidated statements of operations. The cost of product development was 627 million USD. The total costs that year were 4,305 million USD. Do no mistake the numbers in this blog to being closely accurate: the developing of new content is only a part of Blizzard's costs. Public relations, HRM, accounting, management, legal, the servers and internet connection needed to make multiplayer work.... do i need to go on?
I'm sorry if this post seems harsh but so much hate everywhere... companies trying to fuck us over, the government trying to fuck you over... all "proven" with overly simplistic reasoning. Maybe this post is my way of relieving the frustration but damn.....
Honestly guys, call me an optimist but I think you're wrong. I think blizzard is severly overstaffed for what they're outputting, and I think a staff of 20 could make something similar to SC2 in 3 years. I've looked at the numbers again, and assuming you can't get kespa to pay fees and you have to charge monthly you're right. it would take about $15 quarterly to make a profit after 6 years with only 35,000 sales and subs at $10 initially.. however, if you can double those subs then your profits will be closer to 5 million. The interesting point to me is just how powerful a monthly fee can be in funding a game, i'm surprised more companies aren't doing it.
Here's some more info, to get an NPV of 0 with no sales you would need 474,819 people initially paying .33/month.
Without monthly payments you would need the following.. to float purely on sales(price = 10) you would need to start with Y4Q1 sales of 595,584..
to float on a $60 price you would need 99,266 sales.
On April 25 2012 09:02 architecture wrote: There might be something wrong with how Blizzard is being run internally, because they have been ridiculously incompetent.
Consider that the D3 producer left just a month or two ago, before launch! And of course how long D3 has been delayed.
And of course how poor SC2 has been so far.
I think part of the issue is Blizzard is no longer king. They used to be able to put out a game, get great sales, and keep mindshare. But there is easily 10times if not more competition these days for attention. There's a lot of free to play games, games on different non-pc devices etc etc. So Blizzard can still rake in sales, but their same old tricks won't keep people's attention anymore. No one needs UMS maps. There's Steam games, DOTA, LOL, and tons of other stuff to play. It's not 1998 where outside of BNET and CS there were no other multiplayer games. War3 was the last of that period.
2012 is different from 1998 and different from 2004. I don't think they understand that.
But there really isn't any serious competition for RTS, and Blizzard(or Activiosion, I should say) does understand that. So they don't do anything for their base, the ones who are already going to buy the game, because their is no need.
There needs to be a serious competitor in the RTS genre, or else Blizz is simply not going to change and we'll be left with a product of much lower quality then it should be.
Wait, your creating a game with 20 programmers? No testers? A lot the cost of creating anything in software is testing.
And for the game itself..Game designers, sound engineers, artists,voice actor, motion capture? You seem to think that creating a game is about putting a bunch of programmers together in a room with computers.
Cost of "Computers" at 30k? Visual studio pro licenses cost 500$ per dev. Even if you have a ton of discounts through ms dev programs, you'll still need a build server, source control, and bug tracking system. Oh and once your done with a few test cases, you'll need to automate them, so you 'll need a bunch of stuff for that.
5 people post release? I think you have more than 5 people on just battle.net forums answering queries . Plus you also have the cost of keeping a massive system like bnet alive(you might think it's broken, but it is still huge system).
A big problem in a field like this is attrition, and to deal with that you'll have indirect cost of HR work/management, corporate structure. I'm sorry but this just looks like you have no idea of developing anything software related.
While I absolutely agree with you that blizzard is doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs while raking in money, your projections don't seem realistic; hockey sticks in projected profits almost always raise a red flag to investors. The biggest flaw in your projections is that the whole scheme hinges on the assumption that the game, developed by a company of merely twenty programmers at that, will be successful enough to capture an audience of millions for years, when not many games have been able to survive past the 3 year mark in the e-sports scene. A close analogy would be pitching a mobile app that lets you take videos and share it with your friends, akin to what Instagram does except in video. Instagram was recently acquired by Facebook for a whopping $1billion, with a staff of nine nonetheless, so you could probably come up with a business plan full of enticing numbers. However, the truth is that Instagram is a one-in-a-million case, with tons and tons of luck involved, and acquisitions like it will almost certainly never happen in the field of mobile apps ever again.
Your projections have your game selling 300k copies in its first year after release, and a viewership of 1 million right off the bat, which doubles (!) in less than three years. In reality, an RTS developed by an indy company with shitty graphics (most likely), shitty voice acting (most definitely), shitty artwork, shitty sound effects, shitty music, and basically shitty everything else but awesome game-play will not sell 150k copies in its first quarter, nor will it attract a million viewers. Then there are other factors like employee benefits (certainly can hire them as independent contractors but I doubt you will attract good talent without giving them good benefits), intellectual property (HUGE concern in the field of tech start-ups, big money sink due to attorney fees), other misc. fees going towards stuff like server maintenance, and the fact that even if your game really took off, you won't sustain a company with a revenue of that size with merely 25 employees.
To come back full circle, however, I definitely agree that blizzard's goal with SC2 was never about making an awesome game, but launching an awesomely lucrative product, and they aren't doing shit except ogling their revenue stream. The company is basically doing the absolute bare minimum to keep up the image of SC2 as the flagship e-sports game, just so they can continue to milk money from it without the fans abandoning it. My two cents.
Not sure I entirely agree with your assertions about SC2, but regardless this is an interesting read. I'm glad that TL is opening these editorials so to speak, they are sparking some interesting discussions.
I don't agree with your numbers or that independant startups have as good a chance as they would imply. I do agree that Sc2 is an incompetent product and I do agree that Blizzard doesn't care.
I also agree that Blizzard trying to get involved in esports while their product is in the state it's in, is disrespectful to the community. So yeah we've been led around and manipulated for a couple years now. Maybe that's why everyone in Sc2 is so pissed off and anxious.
On April 25 2012 12:00 Sinensis wrote: I don't agree with your numbers or that independant startups have as good a chance as they would imply. I do agree that Sc2 is an incompetent product and I do agree that Blizzard doesn't care.
I also agree that Blizzard trying to get involved in esports while their product is in the state it's in, is disrespectful to the community. So yeah we've been led around and manipulated for a couple years now.
They're getting involved obviously for the money, while only wanting to put in the minimal amount of effort to keep it relevant as a competitive game. The sad part is how obvious their intentions are.
On April 25 2012 12:00 Sinensis wrote: I don't agree with your numbers or that independant startups have as good a chance as they would imply. I do agree that Sc2 is an incompetent product and I do agree that Blizzard doesn't care.
I also agree that Blizzard trying to get involved in esports while their product is in the state it's in, is disrespectful to the community. So yeah we've been led around and manipulated for a couple years now.
They're getting involved obviously for the money, while only wanting to put in the minimal amount of effort to keep it relevant as a competitive game. The sad part is how obvious their intentions are.
I don't know how anyone is actually excited about the upcoming "bnet world championships." We have been having world championships for years. Better ones than Blizzard is capable of putting on. Does anyone remember the last tournament Blizzard attempted? It was Blizzcon. Not last year because they cancelled it. The year before that where instead of streaming important matches, we got to watch jazzbass vs toodming and tired trivia. I have never seen so much internet rage as the esports community after that tournament. It was the tournament that made nestea never want to come back to NA, because he was forced to play on Shattered Temple CLOSE SPAWN POSITIONS.
I don't claim to know everything about the gaming industry, but this is how I view things from my point of view:
Its highly unrealistic for a company to have 20 programmers to make a video game and sustain themselves. You're forgetting about other personnel/assets like voice actors, animators, testers (quality control), artists, modellers, sound engineering, game designers, etc. I know programmers do the number crunching and actually make the game, but without the other assets a company cannot be competitive. It can have kick ass gameplay, but it'll never attract the market into actually buying the game. It needs to be a overall solid package with good marketing to make a game sell. I should really emphasis on the word marketing.
The gameplay could suck or remain unchanged for all I care. Franchises like Call of Duty sells millions but there's actually not much change between each instalment. One of the reasons why its such a big title is because of marketing and brand loyalty. If its popular, a good proportion of people will buy it. Good marketing can do wonders to a game, even if its gameplay is questionably not the best or mediocre.
If you are curious, the average cost to develop a modern video game is roughly $18-28 million. Big blockbuster titles such as Killzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 cost $40-50 million dollars. Gran Turismo 5 is at $80 million. Most expensive game ever to make? Grand Theft Auto IV at $100 million. Well actually scratch that, that was some years ago. Star Wars: The Old Republic is speculated to be as high as $200 million to make. We don't know the actual figures for Starcraft 2's cost, other than the $100 million budget is false and it has had a 7 year development cycle.
Its obvious they made a profit off of it; but that's what companies are supposed to do. Of course this doesn't excuse them from being greedy and lazy on implementing critical and lacking features. But hey you know what? That's normal. Starcraft 2 is no different. It's how the corporations like EA, Ubisoft and Activision are doing things. There's a lot of games out there that are buggy on release, needs patching, and or is missing critical features. This is especially prevalent on the PC. They're half ass games that are shipped out to the market when there are huge problems associated with it. Remember Modern Warfare 2 and its dual 1881 shotguns? That shit was fucking broken for months until they patched it.
You actually think its easy to make a good game to compete with those big blockbuster games? Its very difficult to achieve, even with talent in making a highly polished game. It lacks marketing. Only a very few indie developers are making lots of money (i.e. Minecraft) and that was through innovative (or rather appealing) gameplay, as well as word of mouth. Also, games published on the appstore cannot be compared to the actual video game industry, they are vastly different.
I'm at a resturant and I order my food. I wait two hours for my food to finally be ready, then the waiter just dumps my food off the plate, onto the table and says "enjoy your meal."
I am sitting there without a fork, knife, plate, drink, etc. with my 2 hour late meal spilled all over the table, and the waiter doesn't think there has been any problems with service.
That's Blizzard to me. Doesn't matter how good the food is, your service sucks.
Oh... and when I ask if I'm allowed to have a plate, fork, knife, glass of water, etc. the answer I get is "it's on the wish list" or occasionally "why do you want a fork and a knife with your food?"
while I agree with your sentiment, that game is much much simpler than SC2 in every single aspect and the two should not be compared as they are completely different O_O
Besides whats already been said - you based your assumptions that amateurs could make a game relatively quick and have it be a hit. But looking at the example you gave regarding cecil's game - they say it has over 1 million hours of work towards the game (Which I assume is wrong as with 5 programmers that'd be averaged at 200,000 hours per progammer or roughly 8333 days..
Of course this is all based on the fact those numbers are to be believed - and if they are the game isn't really up to the standards of the masses (sorry cecil). As mentioned by rotting soon as you try to bring everything else up to standards - voice acting, graphics, etc your other costs go up exponentially. Also ontop of that you will need extra positions, salaries, running costs.
Also 300,000k for advertising probably wouldn't be even close to enough to yield the numbers you are expecting to sell. Especially in a day and age where its either virality that makes your product a hit, an amazing fanbase, or a legit actual product (this option being the natural highest costs but once again this wouldn't result in the massive fanbase you'd need so you'd have to add a huge advertising budget ontop of a huge developmental costs).
Everything you've said is pretty much an ideal model for what you'd "want" a game to look like that would beat blizzard. As for people talking about Blizzard not doing enough - we need to realize there are multiple games in dev behind the scenes not to mention their new flagship Titan that no one has any idea about and with that being pushed up the dev chain due to other products being released/closer to release people are pulled off older project to work on unannounced projects (This has been stated in many interviews with their devs). So I guess in the end you could say Blizzard might not be doing enough for the SC2 scene but thats solely from the view of a person thats passionate for the RTS esports scene to not fall down, but from a realist its hard to actually solely blame them.
These numbers are so outrageous. Where is the startup capital coming from? You are going to need a loan that is gonna have interest expense attached to it or you are going to have to convince some investor that a genre that is considered to be relatively dead unless it has Blizzards name behind it is a good investment for them.
Kespa is not going to pay you for the game. You have 0 negotiating power. Blizzard was in a unique situation with a ton of leverage. More likely you will need to pay to have your game in leagues like Hi Rez and Riot have done with their games.
You need to look at industry norms for Indie RTS games, if you can find some, if you can't just find other indie games like here http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/ and get something closer to those figures.
Minecraft or other viral phenomena are not a good example of what sales will be, usually these are the first thing of their kind with nothing else like it. You are making a knock off SC2 that people will be saying, "why not just play broodwar?" about.
Beating blizzard could probably be done, but it won't be by a little indie team. The genre is not easy to develop for. You can't just buy the Unreal 3 engine and start working off that. You will likely be building the engine from the ground up.
More likely someone like Valve jumping into the RTS genre and dethroning blizzard.
I wonder how many programmers are in TL. Maybe we could do our own open source project. We will make the game as it should be, and who knows maybe it will work
I love SC2, but I see a lot of flaws in it. Believe me, they are there, but the reason that SC2 will not die is not that its interface is great or anything, but because the game is fun. People always seem to overlook this aspect; though it can get lonely sometimes and if Blizz doesn't work on the game, yes the game will slowly die. Yes BW will last longer, but that is because their is a niche BW support group of players that love the game because they have played it for 10 years, but SC2 is just in its youth, it will have expansions and it will get better, and the game is still fun to play and watch. SC2 could use a better system, but saying that its pure shit isn't right either in my opinion, if that was true, the scene wouldn't have grown as much as it has (plus the scene is still growing in numbers). Though this was impressive math dude, very well done .
EDIT: I realize there are some issues in the numbers, but the fact that the OP took the time to carry it all out has some merit to it, even if the economic viabilities of it are debatable.
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Perhaps, but some experience in a large project like this may help. Your numbers are crazy made up things. Honestly, 20 programmers + equipment? That's what you need to develop something of the scale of SC2? Wow.
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Perhaps, but some experience in a large project like this may help. Your numbers are crazy made up things. Honestly, 20 programmers + equipment? That's what you need to develop something of the scale of SC2? Wow.
It's actually not so far fetched if you have a really good team.
On April 25 2012 09:02 architecture wrote: There might be something wrong with how Blizzard is being run internally, because they have been ridiculously incompetent.
Consider that the D3 producer left just a month or two ago, before launch! And of course how long D3 has been delayed.
And of course how poor SC2 has been so far.
I think part of the issue is Blizzard is no longer king. They used to be able to put out a game, get great sales, and keep mindshare. But there is easily 10times if not more competition these days for attention. There's a lot of free to play games, games on different non-pc devices etc etc. So Blizzard can still rake in sales, but their same old tricks won't keep people's attention anymore. No one needs UMS maps. There's Steam games, DOTA, LOL, and tons of other stuff to play. It's not 1998 where outside of BNET and CS there were no other multiplayer games. War3 was the last of that period.
2012 is different from 1998 and different from 2004. I don't think they understand that.
Let's not fucking kid ourselves... rose-tinted glasses for BW aside, SC2 itself is a fantastic game and will only get better. Sure, the UI of Bnet 2.0 has a ways to go, but the gameplay is great.
However, I wonder too if there's some stifling of voices/ideas going on inside Blizz HQ. They are s l o w to make any moves (even announcements or communication with the community) in the public domain, and my cynicism makes me suspect that there's an inflated bureaucracy at work. Things just don't happen, or they happen months (years in the case of Bnet 2.0) after the best impact could have been made.
I still have all my sentiments attached to Blizzard right now and I'm relatively optimistic about them (eventually) making the right decisions for the game, but they aren't exactly making all the right moves in all the right places at the moment. We'll see what happens in the next few years.
This. Starcraft 2 as a game is good, the battle.net UI is obviously bad and needs to be redone. Blizzard hired a new battle.net leader unless I am mistaken and hopefully we can get clan support and what not.
If you compare the SC2-BW difference with D2-D3 or DOTA-DOTA2 it's pretty clear that SC2 has failed. It's just not better.
The entire protoss race in SC2 is (relatively) bad/uninteresting to watch due to poor design choices - warpgates/forcefields mean gateway units have to suck, forcing the race to revolve around a few SUPER INTERESTING 'power' units (lol colossus) and some spellcasters rather than real army movements. These choices basically ruin the good design - instead of highly mobile blink stalker/warp prism chargelot harass against an immobile mech army, you get blink stalker all-ins against a bunkered-up marine/marauder force or mobile but somewhat blind/vulnerable blink stalker into colossus turtles against a highly mobile marine/marauder/medivac force. Even the things that worked really well in BW (corsairs) that have decent replacements (phoenixes) rarely work because the fundamentals of the race/game have been altered (for what fucking reason?).
Dustin Browder and the SC2 team basically committed to terrible design philosophy - removing/reworking functional systems for the sake of change rather than improvement - and it shows. SC2 just doesn't feel as good as BW, and SC2's gameplay will never live up to it's predecessor unless the expansions fix it.
Then there's the fact that the game shipped without a functional 'hub' and custom games interface, two things that made BW and WC3 online so attractive to even the casual userbase. And they're not fucking there two years later. There's a reason the LoL playerbase continues to grow at a shocking rate while the SC2 ladder stagnates - and it's not because LoL is a much better game. Better social systems, an addictive rewards/character progression system (which MMO's/COD have proven works) and better eSports support separate the two, not gameplay quality.
It's sad. SC2 is the only real hope for a big/popular RTS right now, and Blizzard is dropping the ball. Regardless of what's better to watch, the most popular genre will be the leading eSport, and at this rate SC2 won't even be a competitor in a few years.
The fact is, RTS is a hard genre to design. Dustin Browder has shipped some of the most popular RTS, but in SC2 there have been enough big design slips (gold bases, better mining rates from each base, Protoss) to show that he and his team don't understand what made BW great. You can crunch numbers all you like, if Browder and Blizzard's bagloads of money/talent can't do it, no start-up is going to get the people who can figure it out - especially since the start-up doesn't have the basic platform of Starcraft to work with. Look at Company of Heroes for a best-case scenario - it's a fantastic game, innovative and well-reviewed, but still not even real competition to SC2.
Our best hope is that Valve decides to compete against Blizzard, and the competition forces something better than what we have. Until then we're stuck with what Blizzard gives us.
On April 25 2012 13:28 docvoc wrote: EDIT: I realize there are some issues in the numbers, but the fact that the OP took the time to carry it all out has some merit to it, even if the economic viabilities of it are debatable.
The entire premise behind his argument is flawed, though? Give him the "E for Effort" award, sure, but the numbers themselves are so far out of the realm of reality I'm not sure why you think it has any merit whatsoever.
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Perhaps, but some experience in a large project like this may help. Your numbers are crazy made up things. Honestly, 20 programmers + equipment? That's what you need to develop something of the scale of SC2? Wow.
It's actually not so far fetched if you have a really good team.
No. No it really is. It's not at all the same as making some little sprite game. Just throwing some "really good programmers" at something does not magically decrease the realities of the resources required, nor does it account for management, design, art, distribution, support, whatever. This may have worked in the 80's and it may work on the App Store. It does not work on the scale of SC2.
Blizzard employs over 4k people and that's after recent layoffs. They're not just doing that to keep them off the street.
For comparison, here's a look at how many people were involved in the original StarCraft.
So what it comes down to is that you shouldn't be making the game in the US. High salary requirement, high healthcare requirement. About same company taxes?
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Perhaps, but some experience in a large project like this may help. Your numbers are crazy made up things. Honestly, 20 programmers + equipment? That's what you need to develop something of the scale of SC2? Wow.
It's actually not so far fetched if you have a really good team.
No. No it really is. It's not at all the same as making some little sprite game. Just throwing some "really good programmers" at something does not magically decrease the realities of the resources required, nor does it account for management, design, art, distribution, support, whatever. This may have worked in the 80's and it may work on the App Store. It does not work on the scale of SC2.
Blizzard employs over 4k people and that's after recent layoffs. They're not just doing that to keep them off the street.
For comparison, here's a look at how many people were involved in the original StarCraft.
Well you're right in that you need a lot of people for a big project, but honestly a big project doesn't necessarily mean a good experience for the player. Prime example is Terraria. One self-taught dude on his first project made a ton of money near instantly on release, all because he made a game that people really loved.
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Perhaps, but some experience in a large project like this may help. Your numbers are crazy made up things. Honestly, 20 programmers + equipment? That's what you need to develop something of the scale of SC2? Wow.
It's actually not so far fetched if you have a really good team.
No. No it really is. It's not at all the same as making some little sprite game. Just throwing some "really good programmers" at something does not magically decrease the realities of the resources required, nor does it account for management, design, art, distribution, support, whatever. This may have worked in the 80's and it may work on the App Store. It does not work on the scale of SC2.
Blizzard employs over 4k people and that's after recent layoffs. They're not just doing that to keep them off the street.
For comparison, here's a look at how many people were involved in the original StarCraft.
Well you're right in that you need a lot of people for a big project, but honestly a big project doesn't necessarily mean a good experience for the player. Prime example is Terraria. One self-taught dude on his first project made a ton of money near instantly on release, all because he made a game that people really loved.
Bigger is not better. Work smarter not harder.
I'd love to see the reaction to Blizzard following up something like SC and SC:BW with a Terraria-style SC2. It's apples and oranges. Terraria is not the same kind of game and certainly not up to the same kind of standard. It's again like saying "4 students made a sprite game, SO Blizzard should be able to make SC2 with that." Which is kind of stupid.
TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Perhaps, but some experience in a large project like this may help. Your numbers are crazy made up things. Honestly, 20 programmers + equipment? That's what you need to develop something of the scale of SC2? Wow.
It's actually not so far fetched if you have a really good team.
No. No it really is. It's not at all the same as making some little sprite game. Just throwing some "really good programmers" at something does not magically decrease the realities of the resources required, nor does it account for management, design, art, distribution, support, whatever. This may have worked in the 80's and it may work on the App Store. It does not work on the scale of SC2.
Blizzard employs over 4k people and that's after recent layoffs. They're not just doing that to keep them off the street.
For comparison, here's a look at how many people were involved in the original StarCraft.
Well you're right in that you need a lot of people for a big project, but honestly a big project doesn't necessarily mean a good experience for the player. Prime example is Terraria. One self-taught dude on his first project made a ton of money near instantly on release, all because he made a game that people really loved.
Bigger is not better. Work smarter not harder.
I think your missing the point here. What schimmetje is trying to say is that it is not possible, with the constraints specified in the op to create a game like sc2 due to the reason specified by many people in this thread. What he is not saying is larger projects are better than indie games.
On April 25 2012 14:45 dogabutila wrote: United States has THE highest corporate income tax of westernized first world countries.
source? cuz i don't think it's true... last I checked we were high but not at the top
well its the "highest" minus the fact that large corporations get massive massive tax cuts down to a criminal level (GE had a coporate tax of something like 13% last year which is lower than middle class americans pay..)
On April 25 2012 14:45 dogabutila wrote: United States has THE highest corporate income tax of westernized first world countries.
source? cuz i don't think it's true... last I checked we were high but not at the top
well its the "highest" minus the fact that large corporations get massive massive tax cuts down to a criminal level (GE had a coporate tax of something like 13% last year which is lower than middle class americans pay..)
yeah, it maxes out at 39.2% i believe, although it varies with tax protection and income level. i just used a flat tax of 35% in the model because it would only be a 4% difference up or down if it actually changed (doesn't really vary when income is so low)
yea these numbers dont surprise me WoW brought in huge amounts of profits compared to expenses. Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, etc they would never do these games without having some plan for these games to match WoW in terms of money made. starcraft 2 is apparently e-sport licensing and diablo 3 is the RMAH. it's disappointing. very nice post.
Always the same with big institutions, once they've grown big it's incredibly hard to keep up and even harder to move on. Vested interests, people becoming complacent, 'this worked before so it'll work in the future', it's everywhere:
Post-WWII the Americans built jets and rockets with slide rulers, 50 years later their space shuttles fall out of the sky and there's a private firm doing fine with a fraction of the budget.
Warcraft I, II and Starcraft were improvements in RTS land, but Blizzard acquired a lot of fat, in the shape of buildings and people, which is slowing them down. Creativity doesn't come from averaging out a lot of people, nor from old people; you need 'young', 'hungry' individuals.
It's too bad the vested interests buy and destroy any competition they can lay their hands on, as did Electronic (dark) Arts with Bullfrog, Westwood, Origin to name but a few. But that's the name of the game. As long as people keep buying rubbish with good graphics, it's their own fault. Same goes for people moaning about 3rd world slavery buying the cheapest chocolate, and unethically manufactured clothes. If you've got information and mony; the possibility to choose and you do not choose wisely, you're an ass. Not the company doing your dirty work for you.
TLDR: If you think Blizzard/Activision sucks, don't buy their games, talk about their evil deeds.
Yes, your theory is just that Blizzard has money and is just lazy. They obviously don't care about their product AT ALL. Even though the Blizzard brand name is their BIGGEST asset ever and what sets them apart from the rest of the gaming industry.
Yes, their reason for delays MUST be laziness. There can't be ANY other explanation.
Your friend's tablet game is DIRECTLY comparable to a company managing 4 online communities and still developing new games.
Seriously?!
I want new b.net features as much as the next guy, but your reasoning in this blog is based purely on rage. Calm down, think about how bad your example is and just be patient.
Blizzard has been consistent with making us wait for as long as it has existed. It is the playerbase that's grown restless rather than the company that's grown incompetent.
On April 25 2012 09:17 Blitzkrieg0 wrote: If it was really this simple there would be a quality RTS released in the past decade. I can't think of a franchise that hasn't gone to shit in the past years ^_^
Idk, valve continues to make sense. I wonder if they will ever release their own RTS...
I would actually love to see this happen, mostly just as a big one up the backdoor of 'shitty blizzard'. And while they are at it, team up with Runic Games (Former Blizzard North, guys who made diablo 1&2) or something and make an epic dungeon crawler.
I'm interested in knowing where you figured your salary figures from. Entry level programming jobs are usually in the $30k / year range; even interns still in college were making around $10/hr (~$20,800 /year). Also, as someone else mentioned, programmers are not artists, modelers, etc, and you would probably need at least one or two of those (check CCP games to see what happens when you have a very small art department for a largish game development studio). You've also neglected various business costs - you WILL want a lawyer on retainer, at the minimum, incorporation fees, payroll services, tax preparation and general accounting, healthcare costs for employees (depends on location of business, of course - you could prototype it in India fairly cheap although costs there are rising as well) - general overhead like that. You also aren't running the balance sheet cumulatively - looking at three years of development, you will wind up at product launch over 3 million in the red (probably more) and will not be making any profits until at least year 5. There's no guarantee that KeSPA would be interested in another RTS without the name recognition in StarCraft, so that's speculative. RTS games in general have been declining in popularity over the years, and you can't base your business model on the idea that ESPORTS will save your product - which makes the break-even / profit stage possibly even later than year 5. You'd require VC or some serious personal investment to get it off the ground, and of course a great idea to be able to sell the game before, during, and after release. You would also have to investigate the systems and mechanics you use to ensure you aren't going to run afoul of patent trolls. (Someone, somewhere, may have patented a "method of gather gas to create tech units" or some such nonsense. Best to be sure before your game makes it big and someone hits you with a billion dollar infringement case.)
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying that the costs are going to be higher than you're projecting, the income stream is far from guaranteed, and that it's risky as hell. Startup game companies can do very well, but a lot of indy studios break before their products can even hit launch. (Mad props to Notch.)
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support
Not true.
So the rest of your post is somewhat meaningless, considering it's based on a stupid, provable false statement.
In addition, your numbers are just fluff. They are completely meaningless. Guess what? If it was that easy, KESPA would have made their own game already.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support
Not true.
So the rest of your post is somewhat meaningless, considering it's based on a stupid, provable false statement.
In addition, your numbers are just fluff. They are completely meaningless. Guess what? If it was that easy, KESPA would have made their own game already.
I just do not get how making the things that are missing in SC2 can be so hard to do. SC2 for me is being carried by TL, without it there would be no way to actually see all the stuff that happens.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support
Not true.
So the rest of your post is somewhat meaningless, considering it's based on a stupid, provable false statement.
In addition, your numbers are just fluff. They are completely meaningless. Guess what? If it was that easy, KESPA would have made their own game already.
I agree completely with this post by aebriol...
In addition, Blizzard has made a lot of improvements based on player feedback (tournament map pool for ladder, fully customisable hotkeys, chat channels, most of complaints addressed in patch 1.5...). Even though SC2 generates very little money for Blizzard until the expansion. Meanwhile, LoL generates insane amounts of profit for Riot Games, but Riot refuses to implement basic features like replays or observers while spending all their effort to create more cash-shop content.
It's also too early to say that SC2 would have failed in Korea. KeSPA is now replacing SC1 with SC2, thus essentially replacing the SC1 cable TV broadcasts with SC2, which will increase SC2's popularity among the common Koreans massively. This will lead to vastly more people playing SC2, watching SC2, and sponsors pouring money to SC2. It's a huge positive loop that will probably secure SC2 as the biggest eSports title in both Korea and the global market so far.
Holy crap this blog entry is so bad I had to register an account just to tell you how bad it is.
$60K per developer per year? Make that around $120K per developer per year, because you have salary (80-100K is somewhat average for non-junior positions), and you have to take into account for taxes, medicare, paid vacations etc.
And that number 20 for "programmers", you realise that if you want to even get close to a proper RTS, you need more then just programmers? You need designers for both the game itself, units and balance, effects and UI, content artists to produce those assets, engineers to build a proper engine (That tablet game? Good luck getting that properly synched over a network), engineers to import those art assets end let the designers create effects. Then of course network engineers to build the infrastructure for your matchmaking, testers and a couple of managers to let everything run smoothly, legal department to make sure you're not going bankrupt the first time something. Let's just say that if you really want to make a fully polished game at the scope of SC1, you will need around 120 manyears, or 40 people working fulltime for 3 years. Also 5 people to support a game that has 300k customers, of which some will be playing on a network infrastructure that also needs to be maintained? And still fixing bugs and patching balance? Good luck with that.
Now, onto computers. 1.5K per computer? Yeah good luck with that. A reasonable developer workstation (i5 or i7, lots of ram with decent graphics card, two high-resolution monitors, licenses for software and miscellaneous stuff like a desk, a proper chair. Lets just say that you're looking at around 5K per developer, and that's excluding maintenance, networking and all that jazz. Add that up, and you could be expecting to spend around 1-2K per developer per year on licenses alone.
Now, as final point, licensing and sales. You will need a sales support team (since people will fsck up their transactions) or have a 3rd party like Steam do it (and eat 30% of your revenue). And if you don't use a 3rd party for sales, you will also have to consider distribution costs, some sort of DRM to make sure all the logins into your multiplayer service are legit, and suddenly you lost 50% of your sales income. And kespa is suddenly going to sponsor you 25 million just so they can broadcast your (unknown) game, when SC1 (and probably later SC2) can be broadcast with a reasonable expected popularity?
I'm not saying that it's impossible, I'm just saying that your math is wrong, your estimates are wrong and you clearly know jack shit about game development.
I agree with baHmi up top, there is a significant amount of underestimating the cost of running this business. DCF/NPV is only going to be as good as your inputs, and it seems like these inputs have no backing at all.
On April 25 2012 20:40 baHmi wrote: Holy crap this blog entry is so bad I had to register an account just to tell you how bad it is.
I have to agree that he is vastly overestimating the difficult and expense. However I also think that it is possible for a small experienced team to make an RTS of BW caliber given the right approach.
Many of the problems people have pointed out could potentially be overcome if the focus of the game was to make a purely professional e-sports focused game. This would mean no single player campaign which would greatly reduce the number of art assets (and mean no need for cut-scenes, extensive voice-work etc). It would also make sense to use the mantra of releasing early and often. Perhaps even releasing alpha builds for player feedback. However the focus should be on making the game engine as deep and as refined as possible. Remember only 15 years ago games cost just 100-200k to develop which is nowhere near 100+ million. These amounts are not necessary at all if the game has a very narrow focus.
To solve many of the money issues you could open source everything except the engine code including all the server code. This would allow community's to run their own servers and ladders (think of minecraft where there is no centralized server). It would also greatly reduce the huge task of maintaining servers and map pools (and dealing with hackers), and would allow others to build server mods.
It would also make sense to support extensive modding not just through a map editor by open sourcing the content creation tools as well. You could let the community supply patches and improvements to the tools (think SCMDraft 2). You would of course also open source the map and replay formats making analysis easier.
All this sounds great but it would be very difficult to get a mainstream audience (and the money that comes with it) to pick up a game like this and it would also be almost impossible to get pro-player feedback during development. Also whether this is financially feasible is unlikely however technically it is possible and perhaps could be funded with a Kickstarter or Minecraft funding model. I have no idea how to solve those issues but a man can dream...
im pretty sure most people who were attached to sc2 soon will just move over DotA2 with valve. They listen to the community and response with in a week. Their games are greatly designed and they will release a custom mapmaker in the future.
On April 25 2012 22:10 NB wrote: im pretty sure most people who were attached to sc2 soon will just move over DotA2 with valve. They listen to the community and response with in a week. Their games are greatly designed and they will release a custom mapmaker in the future.
Dota 2 is a MOBA. SC2 is not a MOBA. There are already popular MOBAs available for people that want to play MOBAs. I don't understand your logic.
Don't worry Orome and me are constantly coming up with fucking genius plans to get rich enough to buy activision and get Starcraft 3 done the way it's supposed to. Just wait for it.
Anyway, i'm not sure how realistic i think this is; it's highly, highly unlikely an indipendent community will create a game that will sell enough to challenge a major company like Blizzard. But then again, Riot Games :D one can hope!
On April 25 2012 22:10 NB wrote: im pretty sure most people who were attached to sc2 soon will just move over DotA2 with valve. They listen to the community and response with in a week. Their games are greatly designed and they will release a custom mapmaker in the future.
Dota 2 is a MOBA. SC2 is not a MOBA. There are already popular MOBAs available for people that want to play MOBAs. I don't understand your logic.
its about esports building. soon sc2 will be the worst esports title out there simply bc other companies will learn from blizzard mistakes and step their game up. Look at D3, they dont even have private chat channel + PvP upon release, Blizzard has learned NOTHING from their mistake of building esports title.
its about esports building. soon sc2 will be the worst esports title out there simply bc other companies will learn from blizzard mistakes and step their game up. Look at D3, they dont even have private chat channel + PvP upon release, Blizzard has learned NOTHING from their mistake of building esports title.
d3 is not an esport title, nor have they ever had plans to make it one. Sure, it will have an arena system that is competitive, but they've clearly stated that they dont have plans to make it an esport in such a way that it would affect the PvE experience. B.net 2.0 sucks, but the rest of D3 is just as it should be.
Also, I think that OP is wrong with his estimates and money consumption math, but is correct as far as Blizzard not doing the fixes it clearly should have done, and which it clearly has had the time to do yet hasn't done.
On April 25 2012 22:10 NB wrote: im pretty sure most people who were attached to sc2 soon will just move over DotA2 with valve. They listen to the community and response with in a week. Their games are greatly designed and they will release a custom mapmaker in the future.
Dota 2 is a MOBA. SC2 is not a MOBA. There are already popular MOBAs available for people that want to play MOBAs. I don't understand your logic.
its about esports building. soon sc2 will be the worst esports title out there simply bc other companies will learn from blizzard mistakes and step their game up. Look at D3, they dont even have private chat channel + PvP upon release, Blizzard has learned NOTHING from their mistake of building esports title.
D3 isn't really meant to be an esport, but i get what you mean. You really get the feeling that Blizzard doesn't give a shit about community, customers and game quality anymore...at least not nearly as much as they used to.
I really don't understand why people are so critical of Blizzard for SC2, when they launched it into a gaming scene that hadn't had a major RTS success in years. SC2 is an amazingly polished game with a great map editor and a lot of custom games (which for me is like getting many more games for free). Yes people have been asking for clans, but it wouldn't offer anything that you couldn't already easily create in a Facebook group. I feel like we have this amazing game and people are just nit-picking about stuff which wouldn't actually impact the game at all anyway.
I for one respect the fact that Blizzard isn't too close to the community, because if they listened to all the stupid stuff people have requested since SC2's release they would have been jumping through hoops left and right, and we would have ended up with a much worse game.
On April 25 2012 23:12 deathly rat wrote: I really don't understand why people are so critical of Blizzard for SC2, when they launched it into a gaming scene that hadn't had a major RTS success in years. SC2 is an amazingly polished game with a great map editor and a lot of custom games (which for me is like getting many more games for free). Yes people have been asking for clans, but it wouldn't offer anything that you couldn't already easily create in a Facebook group. I feel like we have this amazing game and people are just nit-picking about stuff which wouldn't actually impact the game at all anyway.
I for one respect the fact that Blizzard isn't too close to the community, because if they listened to all the stupid stuff people have requested since SC2's release they would have been jumping through hoops left and right, and we would have ended up with a much worse game.
On April 25 2012 13:13 bokeevboke wrote: I wonder how many programmers are in TL. Maybe we could do our own open source project. We will make the game as it should be, and who knows maybe it will work
On April 25 2012 13:13 bokeevboke wrote: I wonder how many programmers are in TL. Maybe we could do our own open source project. We will make the game as it should be, and who knows maybe it will work
On April 25 2012 23:12 deathly rat wrote: I really don't understand why people are so critical of Blizzard for SC2, when they launched it into a gaming scene that hadn't had a major RTS success in years. SC2 is an amazingly polished game with a great map editor and a lot of custom games (which for me is like getting many more games for free). Yes people have been asking for clans, but it wouldn't offer anything that you couldn't already easily create in a Facebook group. I feel like we have this amazing game and people are just nit-picking about stuff which wouldn't actually impact the game at all anyway.
I for one respect the fact that Blizzard isn't too close to the community, because if they listened to all the stupid stuff people have requested since SC2's release they would have been jumping through hoops left and right, and we would have ended up with a much worse game.
We have asked for the same things since before the release.... and we only have one of those requests/demands fulfilled. Nothing that we want is stupid. Of course im mainly referring to chat channels/clan support/LANLANLANLAN/ect.
On April 25 2012 22:10 NB wrote: im pretty sure most people who were attached to sc2 soon will just move over DotA2 with valve. They listen to the community and response with in a week. Their games are greatly designed and they will release a custom mapmaker in the future.
Dota 2 is a MOBA. SC2 is not a MOBA. There are already popular MOBAs available for people that want to play MOBAs. I don't understand your logic.
its about esports building. soon sc2 will be the worst esports title out there simply bc other companies will learn from blizzard mistakes and step their game up. Look at D3, they dont even have private chat channel + PvP upon release, Blizzard has learned NOTHING from their mistake of building esports title.
D3 isn't really meant to be an esport, but i get what you mean. You really get the feeling that Blizzard doesn't give a shit about community, customers and game quality anymore...at least not nearly as much as they used to.
actually D3 could easily make an esport title if they do the PvP correctly.
On April 25 2012 20:40 baHmi wrote: Holy crap this blog entry is so bad I had to register an account just to tell you how bad it is.
Many of the problems people have pointed out could potentially be overcome if the focus of the game was to make a purely professional e-sports focused game. This would mean no single player campaign which would greatly reduce the number of art assets (and mean no need for cut-scenes, extensive voice-work etc). It would also make sense to use the mantra of releasing early and often. Perhaps even releasing alpha builds for player feedback. However the focus should be on making the game engine as deep and as refined as possible. Remember only 15 years ago games cost just 100-200k to develop which is nowhere near 100+ million. These amounts are not necessary at all if the game has a very narrow focus.
The problem with this kind of model is that it will be very difficult to get a critical mass of users to gain a foothold as an esport. One of the reasons SC2 is so popular in (western) esports is because of it's accessibility. The single player campaign can be beaten by anyone if they just drop the difficulty low enough. Flashy graphics, cut-scenes, voice-overs, all lure the casual crowd into the game. And once in, they may stick around for the esports side of it.
The model you're proposing would only serve a very small, hardcore group of competitive gamers and is unlikely to expand beyond that.
On April 25 2012 20:40 baHmi wrote: Holy crap this blog entry is so bad I had to register an account just to tell you how bad it is.
Many of the problems people have pointed out could potentially be overcome if the focus of the game was to make a purely professional e-sports focused game. This would mean no single player campaign which would greatly reduce the number of art assets (and mean no need for cut-scenes, extensive voice-work etc). It would also make sense to use the mantra of releasing early and often. Perhaps even releasing alpha builds for player feedback. However the focus should be on making the game engine as deep and as refined as possible. Remember only 15 years ago games cost just 100-200k to develop which is nowhere near 100+ million. These amounts are not necessary at all if the game has a very narrow focus.
The problem with this kind of model is that it will be very difficult to get a critical mass of users to gain a foothold as an esport. One of the reasons SC2 is so popular in (western) esports is because of it's accessibility. The single player campaign can be beaten by anyone if they just drop the difficulty low enough. Flashy graphics, cut-scenes, voice-overs, all lure the casual crowd into the game. And once in, they may stick around for the esports side of it.
The model you're proposing would only serve a very small, hardcore group of competitive gamers and is unlikely to expand beyond that.
exactly, the million person viewership and 300K copies sold in its first year, that's out the window.
Instead of bashing op about inaccurate assumptions about game development, I'd like to agree with the fact that Blizzard is way too slow in realizing that they've missed crucial features necessary to SC2's success. I think that's the main point the op was trying to make. How can you release a game intended to be the flagship of e-sports without chat channels or clan support? Professional gaming teams are an integral part of making SC2 the flagship of e-sports, yet there is no way to tell whether or not any user online is part of a 'professional' team. What's even more laughable was the fact that you couldn't even reset your username so if your team changed, you were screwed.
And then in terms of making it a spectator sport Blizzard failed again. No replay sharing? No LAN or any safety features like saving a game's state in case of network problems in a HUGE tournament? The point is that with what blizzard has already accomplished these missing features could easily be accomplished and have been delivered to us, but they haven't because Blizzard doesn't really care.
There's also the fact that the UI sucks and is slow as hell, it takes forever to load someone's profile and Battle.net frequently goes down for maintenance / updates. The entire user experience is terrible, I have to navigate through 3 sets of menus to find what I'm looking for in my own profile.
so instead of address the vast majority of his post and the information it presents we should generally whine about how blizzard hasn't met various goals? seems less on topic
On April 26 2012 00:58 Xyik wrote: Instead of bashing op about inaccurate assumptions about game development, I'd like to agree with the fact that Blizzard is way too slow in realizing that they've missed crucial features necessary to SC2's success. I think that's the main point the op was trying to make. How can you release a game intended to be the flagship of e-sports without chat channels or clan support? Professional gaming teams are an integral part of making SC2 the flagship of e-sports, yet there is no way to tell whether or not any user online is part of a 'professional' team. What's even more laughable was the fact that you couldn't even reset your username so if your team changed, you were screwed.
And then in terms of making it a spectator sport Blizzard failed again. No replay sharing? No LAN or any safety features like saving a game's state in case of network problems in a HUGE tournament? The point is that with what blizzard has already accomplished these missing features could easily be accomplished and have been delivered to us, but they haven't because Blizzard doesn't really care.
There's also the fact that the UI sucks and is slow as hell, it takes forever to load someone's profile and Battle.net frequently goes down for maintenance / updates. The entire user experience is terrible, I have to navigate through 3 sets of menus to find what I'm looking for in my own profile.
Those are points he briefly glances over, but do not make up the majority of his argument. His argument is that there should be a rival company capable of rising to compete with Blizzard - and that blizzard's business model in regards to KESPA is misguided. I can agree with the latter half of that point, but the financials of launching any AAA-class RTS in this market is very unlikely.
Because his argument is supported by his financial expectations, that is the evidence that can be attacked to weaken his argument (which it has been). Running a company is an absurdly expensive endeavor when it comes to AAA global reach. Simultaneous release worldwide in retail format? Even online distribution has high costs. SC2 was hyped for two years with a huge marketing force behind it (Remember when they revealed their "Ghosts of Gettysberg" cinematic during a NBA game?).
There have been tons of valid well-constructed posts about features which SC2 is missing and needs - which I'm sure most of us have been involved in. This is not about that, however.
As a closing note, the transition to a sustainable income model is not inherently flawed and does represent the future of video games in general, it seems. Microtranscations are the current norm; however, real money auction house (which has the potential to benefit both users as well as the company) and tournament licensing also are shaping up to have good potential. I would say the latter model needs more support and "umph" behind it in regards to Blizzard - but I suspect that's why we're having so many growing pains (tournaments getting IP-Blocked, etc.) in the process. It's new territory for both sides of the conundrum.
For all its failures in features and in potentially Korea (which I'd have to see the financials to comment on), SC2 has been very successful on a global scale.
Until that new RTS is realised, I think SC2 will continue to play the dominant role in esports as an RTS. However I do feel that blizzard and activision are SLOWLY killing themselves.
I feel everything we want will be released in HOTS, and that will be released as a 'new game' price which will be the final nail in the coffin for the player. I won't stop watching, but I sure as hell aren't paying a full price for the second third of a game I already payed for.
Please someone step up and create a new RTS that will be a rival...C&C could get there if they cut the shit, apart from that I can't imagine anything else coming close
On April 25 2012 19:30 Grend wrote: I just do not get how making the things that are missing in SC2 can be so hard to do. SC2 for me is being carried by TL, without it there would be no way to actually see all the stuff that happens.
This. Without TL sc2 would be dead already. All the casuals have left the game a long time ago. Blizzard is doing worse than nothing to help the esports scene because they're charging tournaments for hosting their game, and they can do that by having no LAN which further screws us over.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support
Do we know this? Last time I checked SC2 is my favorite game to play, favorite game to watch, and competing in the AHGL was a ton of fun just because SC2 is such a great game.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Right, b/c an arrogant TL blogger who knows nothing about game development would be way better than an "arrogant activision executive".
It really, really bothers me when people talk about SC2 sucking, or Blizzard not caring at all about their customers, or just greedy greedy Activision blah blah blah. Let me explain:
Blizzard only will continue to be successful as long as their customers like their games, enjoy their games, and continue buying their games. They have no choice but to care about their customers. Let's see what they've done so far:
1) Kept the map pool fresh, and have continuously improved the map pool since release. Long gone are the days of Slag Pits and Steppes of War. 2) Continous balance patches to maintain balance in the game. Sure, I know many of you will be like "BUT ZERG IS FAILING HARD IN GSL RIGHT NOW!" or "BUT PROTOSS GOT STOMPED AT MLG AND DREAMHACK!", but the fact is that the game is insanely well balanced given the differences between the races. No one below pro level should ever complain anyway, as it should be simple to look at your games and see how terrible you are playing, and see ways in which you could have improved your game and won. I'm mid-masters and I am terrible at Starcraft 2. My skill is so far below the skill ceiling it is painful, and yet I'm in the top 2% of players. Blizzard has done an AMAZING job with their game design and balance patches. 3) Experimented with match-making settings and used user feedback to determine which settings to use. 4) Added chat channels and occasional name changes. 5) Promoted awesome leagues like the AHGL (for which they donated the $5,000 prize to charity). Playing in the AHGL was one of the most fun and rewarding experiences in my entire life.
None of these things directly make Blizzard money. There is no subscription fee in SC2, and adding features to WoL is not nearly as important for their business as is making sure HotS is a success. That said, they clearly care about ensuring that the ladder keeps running smoothly so that players will continue to enjoy their game and purchase HotS when it comes out. Features like clan support and shared replay watching simply are not important enough, and too much work, to put into WoL at this point.
As Day[9] said at the AHGL Finals -- Thank you, Blizzard, for making Starcraft 2!!
The whole number projection is a little beyond me, but I do agree with your points about Blizzard's attitude towards SC2. Simply put: they just don't give a fuck. It's so sad.
On April 25 2012 12:00 Sinensis wrote: I don't agree with your numbers or that independant startups have as good a chance as they would imply. I do agree that Sc2 is an incompetent product and I do agree that Blizzard doesn't care.
I also agree that Blizzard trying to get involved in esports while their product is in the state it's in, is disrespectful to the community. So yeah we've been led around and manipulated for a couple years now.
They're getting involved obviously for the money, while only wanting to put in the minimal amount of effort to keep it relevant as a competitive game. The sad part is how obvious their intentions are.
I don't know how anyone is actually excited about the upcoming "bnet world championships." We have been having world championships for years. Better ones than Blizzard is capable of putting on. Does anyone remember the last tournament Blizzard attempted? It was Blizzcon. Not last year because they cancelled it. The year before that where instead of streaming important matches, we got to watch jazzbass vs toodming and tired trivia. I have never seen so much internet rage as the esports community after that tournament. It was the tournament that made nestea never want to come back to NA, because he was forced to play on Shattered Temple CLOSE SPAWN POSITIONS.
On April 26 2012 03:39 Telcontar wrote: The whole number projection is a little beyond me, but I do agree with your points about Blizzard's attitude towards SC2. Simply put: they just don't give a fuck. It's so sad.
its beyond sad.i almost had tears of joy in my eyes when i started up beta first time(paid 40$ for a key) and when i had the retail box in my hands.
now basicly i dont give a damn anymore. i havent played in months, didnt ladder for over a year and just sometimes view the bigger free tournaments.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support
Do we know this? Last time I checked SC2 is my favorite game to play, favorite game to watch, and competing in the AHGL was a ton of fun just because SC2 is such a great game.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Right, b/c an arrogant TL blogger who knows nothing about game development would be way better than an "arrogant activision executive".
It really, really bothers me when people talk about SC2 sucking, or Blizzard not caring at all about their customers, or just greedy greedy Activision blah blah blah. Let me explain:
Blizzard only will continue to be successful as long as their customers like their games, enjoy their games, and continue buying their games. They have no choice but to care about their customers. Let's see what they've done so far:
1) Kept the map pool fresh, and have continuously improved the map pool since release. Long gone are the days of Slag Pits and Steppes of War. 2) Continous balance patches to maintain balance in the game. Sure, I know many of you will be like "BUT ZERG IS FAILING HARD IN GSL RIGHT NOW!" or "BUT PROTOSS GOT STOMPED AT MLG AND DREAMHACK!", but the fact is that the game is insanely well balanced given the differences between the races. No one below pro level should ever complain anyway, as it should be simple to look at your games and see how terrible you are playing, and see ways in which you could have improved your game and won. I'm mid-masters and I am terrible at Starcraft 2. My skill is so far below the skill ceiling it is painful, and yet I'm in the top 2% of players. Blizzard has done an AMAZING job with their game design and balance patches. 3) Experimented with match-making settings and used user feedback to determine which settings to use. 4) Added chat channels and occasional name changes. 5) Promoted awesome leagues like the AHGL (for which they donated the $5,000 prize to charity). Playing in the AHGL was one of the most fun and rewarding experiences in my entire life.
None of these things directly make Blizzard money. There is no subscription fee in SC2, and adding features to WoL is not nearly as important for their business as is making sure HotS is a success. That said, they clearly care about ensuring that the ladder keeps running smoothly so that players will continue to enjoy their game and purchase HotS when it comes out. Features like clan support and shared replay watching simply are not important enough, and too much work, to put into WoL at this point.
As Day[9] said at the AHGL Finals -- Thank you, Blizzard, for making Starcraft 2!!
Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
On April 25 2012 20:40 baHmi wrote:Now, onto computers. 1.5K per computer? Yeah good luck with that. A reasonable developer workstation (i5 or i7, lots of ram with decent graphics card, two high-resolution monitors, licenses for software and miscellaneous stuff like a desk, a proper chair. Lets just say that you're looking at around 5K per developer, and that's excluding maintenance, networking and all that jazz. Add that up, and you could be expecting to spend around 1-2K per developer per year on licenses alone.
This is a good point brought up which I had forgotten. Often times a game in alpha will be more demanding to run than the finished product, because the coding and graphical renders are all unoptimized. Assuming you're going to be making an RTS that is similar to the scale of StarCraft 2, you want to do a stress test to make sure the computer won't suddenly blow up with masses of units running about dying on the map. Obviously one can ignore anything beyond 1v1 if the focus is on competitive play (hence effectively capping the number of units to 400 on the map at any given time), but if you're neglecting the 2v2 and beyond groups then you're essentially doing the same thing as Blizzard is.
During development, high resolution 3D models often reach staggering numbers and it can reach to the millions if you're using high resolution sculpturing software like ZBrush. A million polygon is probably more than what an average game renders in a level. I don't have solid numbers on the average polygon count for characters, but they're usually optimized to be at 5,000 - 20,000, sometimes less. What I'm getting at is, often times you need high performing computer to render a model. Though I suppose not using ZBrush is an option.
Licensing software can become expensive pretty quickly. The software itself is already a pain in the ass. Most professional developers use Maya or 3ds Max. Luckily open source software such as Blender is available surprisingly enough, though I haven't heard of any developers using Blender (at least the big developers). Not that Blender isn't good, in fact it is an exceptional piece of software.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
Made me laugh. You do know that these 2D "fully functional games" are written with a couple fo thousand lines of code. While a triple A game goes into the millions? They are lazy with patching though. Probably because of all the time and resources going into HotS. If they wont update many of the missing feature then. Then you might have a valid point.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
I agree with this...they've made it known that they hear the concerns that the community has. They definitely have listened in regards to gameplay and that's the most important feature of a game. HotS must take priority right now...unless people want a terrible expansion, it seems crazy to worry more about the improvement of social features RIGHT NOW as opposed to a game that has longevity through its content. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that everyone got so worked up about the social features lacking. That was because we had bigger concerns regarding game balance and the horrendous map pool. With patch 1.5 they're at least making an attempt to remedy yet another community gripe. Regardless, people won't be satisfied...it's how it always works.
They are trying to support the community...Blizzard certainly isn't hands off. If you want to see that, go look at any game published by EA. If you get changes from them, you pay for them. Blizzard isn't doing that with SC2 and this game, despite all of the negativity from some vocal community members has a solid base of players and a fairly well established pro scene. Find that with any other game on the market and then find me a company who continues to put in effort to ensure it stays that way. MOBAs are the only other exception at this moment and the money being pumped into their scene comes directly from the parent companies. With the market supersaturated with these games right now, that scene lacks any real cohesion. DOTA2 will fight against LoL just like FPS games fight each other. SC2 will change drastically with HotS which will bring in new blood and renew interest in the game. That is the most important thing.
As for the actual numbers that Blizzard is working with, I don't think they will make a bad business decision. It's funny how someone can say that they've turned into a greed-based company with no interest in their customers and then turn around to say that they're making a business decision that will be unsustainable. How can a company that is concerned with money to the point of near-intentional community neglect (supposedly) do something that will kill the eSports scene and stunt their income? I don't think they can/will. Of course Blizzard wants money...that is what they've always done. The $15 a year per viewer deal with Kespa has other factors that you simply don't know about. It would make no business sense to overcharge and I guarantee you that they aren't financially retarded. They crunch the real numbers...not just some hypothetical licensing fees and estimations on capital investments/salaries. The funny thing is, the OP would be infuriating if it were true. Sadly, one piece of information thrown in with hypothetical scenarios often comes out with unintentionally bias results. Talk about how terrible Blizzard is at supporting the community and how greedy they are...I personally wouldn't question their ability to make money. They know the price point for products and they understand how to bargain. Let the details work themselves out and it will probably be much different than any scenario people on a forum could come up with.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
I agree with this...they've made it known that they hear the concerns that the community has. They definitely have listened in regards to gameplay and that's the most important feature of a game. HotS must take priority right now...unless people want a terrible expansion, it seems crazy to worry more about the improvement of social features RIGHT NOW as opposed to a game that has longevity through its content. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that everyone got so worked up about the social features lacking. That was because we had bigger concerns regarding game balance and the horrendous map pool. With patch 1.5 they're at least making an attempt to remedy yet another community gripe. Regardless, people won't be satisfied...it's how it always works.
They are trying to support the community...Blizzard certainly isn't hands off. If you want to see that, go look at any game published by EA. If you get changes from them, you pay for them. Blizzard isn't doing that with SC2 and this game, despite all of the negativity from some vocal community members has a solid base of players and a fairly well established pro scene. Find that with any other game on the market and then find me a company who continues to put in effort to ensure it stays that way. MOBAs are the only other exception at this moment and the money being pumped into their scene comes directly from the parent companies. With the market supersaturated with these games right now, that scene lacks any real cohesion. DOTA2 will fight against LoL just like FPS games fight each other. SC2 will change drastically with HotS which will bring in new blood and renew interest in the game. That is the most important thing.
As for the actual numbers that Blizzard is working with, I don't think they will make a bad business decision. It's funny how someone can say that they've turned into a greed-based company with no interest in their customers and then turn around to say that they're making a business decision that will be unsustainable. How can a company that is concerned with money to the point of near-intentional community neglect (supposedly) do something that will kill the eSports scene and stunt their income? I don't think they can/will. Of course Blizzard wants money...that is what they've always done. The $15 a year per viewer deal with Kespa has other factors that you simply don't know about. It would make no business sense to overcharge and I guarantee you that they aren't financially retarded. They crunch the real numbers...not just some hypothetical licensing fees and estimations on capital investments/salaries. The funny thing is, the OP would be infuriating if it were true. Sadly, one piece of information thrown in with hypothetical scenarios often comes out with unintentionally bias results. Talk about how terrible Blizzard is at supporting the community and how greedy they are...I personally wouldn't question their ability to make money. They know the price point for products and they understand how to bargain. Let the details work themselves out and it will probably be much different than any scenario people on a forum could come up with.
this is exactly the the apathy that I think is ruining both the community and the game itself.. blizzard doesn't give us something that we had 8 years ago like clan support or name change? oh don't worry they're a big company, they'll do it eventually.. region locking because it's "too laggy" where as iccup and valve and fish all seem to have it pretty well down? oh they're certainly doing the right thing for us. face it, blizzard doesn't communicate with us unless they're cutting features. "do you REALLY want chat channels?" tell me, how involved is the community with HOTS's development? we have nearly 7 month old information on units that've probably already been cut, why isn't development completely open so that they can atleast humor professional gamers' opinions?
their business practices are shaky at best imo, and how well sc2 will do in korea post SC2PL is still yet to be seen..
On April 26 2012 06:21 Endymion wrote: this is exactly the the apathy that I think is ruining both the community and the game itself.. blizzard doesn't give us something that we had 8 years ago like clan support or name change? oh don't worry they're a big company, they'll do it eventually.. region locking because it's "too laggy" where as iccup and valve and fish all seem to have it pretty well down? oh they're certainly doing the right thing for us. face it, blizzard doesn't communicate with us unless they're cutting features. "do you REALLY want chat channels?" tell me, how involved is the community with HOTS's development? we have nearly 7 month old information on units that've probably already been cut, why isn't development completely open so that they can atleast humor professional gamers' opinions?
their business practices are shaky at best imo, and how well sc2 will do in korea post SC2PL is still yet to be seen..
Nobody cares about clan support. Games are not developed by the community. Look at the Blizzard forums for a second for community suggestions on balance and game design. It's a shit show. The community does not know how to design games, but Blizzard does. David Kim plays the game at basically a pro level. Pro players will get to weigh in on HotS balance.
Blizzard doesn't communicate with us unless they're cutting features??? What about the last matchmaking changes? They communicated the experiment, the end of the experiment, and then the final policy on the matchmaking changes. What about balance changes that always come out with detailed explanations. What about the last announcement about the upcoming changes to the custom game lobby?
The community has been complaining non-stop since release and Blizzard has listened. First it was maps and balance issues, not it's the BNET2 UI (which no one seemed to care about for the first year after release). They hear us, they are working on it, I'm not telling people to shut up and stop complaining, but I am telling people to stop saying the Blizzard doesn't give a fuck. They care about their game's success.
A few of the other posters have mentioned this already, but I think it bears pointing out again, partially because I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with your financial analysis. You have very, very severely underestimated the cost.
For development, programming is simply one staff cost, and not the only one. You not only have programmers but game designers, artists, composers, writers, sound engineers, testers etc. A full development team (with the bells and whistles expected in a 3D game) can get expensive pretty quickly.
You are severely underestimating some of the computer, facilities and equipment costs, partially I think because you are severely understaffing the project.
You are missing a ton of other costs: Licensing fees: for tech such as game engines, or Dolby digital, or MP3/AAC, or copyrighted music or images Customer service: call/email service center and community management staff Systems maintenance staff and costs: datacenter costs, website design and maintenance, production server setup and maintenance, dbas etc. Of course if you are simply releasing a game playable over lan with no tracking (e.g. no need to track match history, ladder ranks, clan tracking etc.) you can also set this to near 0. Attorneys: either in house or on retainer Accountants Information Technology DRM: if you choose to have DRM on the product, I suggest not having any Distribution: e.g. steam, or other digital platform. Retail distribution is even more expensive Executive Management: I suggest not having any executive management either, if you can help it. Benefits: Employee benefits (e.g. healthcare). Should probably also include payroll tax, and other personel expenses. (this can be rolled into salary if you wish)
...And I'm sure I'm missing a whole bunch of stuff.
When you are a startup, especially when you are working from home/dorm, your home is your office, your personal internet connection is also your business internet. Your programming environment is provided by your school or workplace. You have no physical distribution costs. You pray you don't get sued over licensing issues, or you are likely to simply go out of business or stop your project entirely. You handle your own contract negotiation and accounting (and sometimes mess it up because you aren't a professional in that field). You provide your own marketing and customer support for the lifetime of your product, at the expense of your own time, which may seriously increase the development timeline. You will still likely need professional services on some of these items.
Bottom line is: Trying to get a real ROI on a fully-fleshed out business is much more difficult. I don't disagree that blizzards pricing and/or support is bad, I just think you need to put some more thought in and adjust the model if you really want to compare the costs of creating and sustaining a game for a start-up to what it would likely cost blizzard (now blizzard-activation) the corporation. There is a reason why startups (and more agile companies in general) can have some distinct advantages over large corporations, but for AAA fully featured titles they aren't as large as your analysis represents I dont' think.
I think you should take another stab at getting more realistic numbers, though I'm not sure what exactly would be reasonable myself. Probably closer to 60 development staff total, and 50-75 customer support staff across all regions and languages (and for support that's still probably way too low). Someone within the industry could probably give you a better idea. You should probably also add cost to launch (marketing, distribution, etc.), add technology and copyright licensing costs, add costs for the ongoing support (datacenter, production server, database administrators and other internal maintenance staff), and add costs for corporate allocation (attorneys, accountants, information technology support) that a 120 or so man organization will need. I think you'll find it is much more expensive to maintain than your initial assumptions show. Also, if you expect to continue game development and support (e.g. adding new features), then you should include a part of the development staff costs as ongoing for the life of the game. While it may be cheaper for a startup, you still need all these components.
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make originally? That the fee Blizzard is asking of KESPA is outrageous? That a startup could compete effectively in the same space? Yeah, that's probably the case, but the financial model you use as supporting evidence for your argument grossly misrepresents the business case, and I can't take the argument seriously when the numbers are so grossly misrepresented.
Edit: I suck at proof-reading my own posts. Fixed many issues. Note, I'm not an expert on the industry, so maybe i'm wrong about the number of development staff you'd need. writing a fully 3d game with millions of lines of code, 3d textures and meshs, a single-player story, multiplayer balance, voice acting, etc. seems like a much bigger undertaking to me than what 20 'programmers' would be able to accomplish in 3 years time. Indy game development typically has a large number of limitations. Indy games tend to be very simplistic in many ways, and harken back to older days (e.g. units can only fire if on a distinct 'square' where the engine can easily determine where exactly the unit is and how to calculate range, rather than what appears to be closer to combat anywhere model).
@OP : Since I'm playing Blizzard games for about 8 years now and also see them getting destroyed by their own creators I often think about how it could be changed.
I think that your calculations are a good idea BUT I think your largely underestimate the costs of production. There should be a lot more employees in game design (at least x5 times your estimations) but also the "administrative" part of the project like PR, customer service ...etc and software licenses (3D software "3DsMax" costs around 6k-8k per license I think so multiply this for every designer in your start-up).
After the release the best idea would be to make the game open-source so that individual programmers could create "forks" of the game (like Linux distributions) with one "official" distribution that can only be modified by employees or by community made modifications that are verified / validated by employees.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
I agree with this...they've made it known that they hear the concerns that the community has. They definitely have listened in regards to gameplay and that's the most important feature of a game. HotS must take priority right now...unless people want a terrible expansion, it seems crazy to worry more about the improvement of social features RIGHT NOW as opposed to a game that has longevity through its content. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that everyone got so worked up about the social features lacking. That was because we had bigger concerns regarding game balance and the horrendous map pool. With patch 1.5 they're at least making an attempt to remedy yet another community gripe. Regardless, people won't be satisfied...it's how it always works.
They are trying to support the community...Blizzard certainly isn't hands off. If you want to see that, go look at any game published by EA. If you get changes from them, you pay for them. Blizzard isn't doing that with SC2 and this game, despite all of the negativity from some vocal community members has a solid base of players and a fairly well established pro scene. Find that with any other game on the market and then find me a company who continues to put in effort to ensure it stays that way. MOBAs are the only other exception at this moment and the money being pumped into their scene comes directly from the parent companies. With the market supersaturated with these games right now, that scene lacks any real cohesion. DOTA2 will fight against LoL just like FPS games fight each other. SC2 will change drastically with HotS which will bring in new blood and renew interest in the game. That is the most important thing.
As for the actual numbers that Blizzard is working with, I don't think they will make a bad business decision. It's funny how someone can say that they've turned into a greed-based company with no interest in their customers and then turn around to say that they're making a business decision that will be unsustainable. How can a company that is concerned with money to the point of near-intentional community neglect (supposedly) do something that will kill the eSports scene and stunt their income? I don't think they can/will. Of course Blizzard wants money...that is what they've always done. The $15 a year per viewer deal with Kespa has other factors that you simply don't know about. It would make no business sense to overcharge and I guarantee you that they aren't financially retarded. They crunch the real numbers...not just some hypothetical licensing fees and estimations on capital investments/salaries. The funny thing is, the OP would be infuriating if it were true. Sadly, one piece of information thrown in with hypothetical scenarios often comes out with unintentionally bias results. Talk about how terrible Blizzard is at supporting the community and how greedy they are...I personally wouldn't question their ability to make money. They know the price point for products and they understand how to bargain. Let the details work themselves out and it will probably be much different than any scenario people on a forum could come up with.
this is exactly the the apathy that I think is ruining both the community and the game itself.. blizzard doesn't give us something that we had 8 years ago like clan support or name change? oh don't worry they're a big company, they'll do it eventually.. region locking because it's "too laggy" where as iccup and valve and fish all seem to have it pretty well down? oh they're certainly doing the right thing for us. face it, blizzard doesn't communicate with us unless they're cutting features. "do you REALLY want chat channels?" tell me, how involved is the community with HOTS's development? we have nearly 7 month old information on units that've probably already been cut, why isn't development completely open so that they can atleast humor professional gamers' opinions?
their business practices are shaky at best imo, and how well sc2 will do in korea post SC2PL is still yet to be seen..
So they should hire a bunch of coders to overhaul the entire interface of a game that's a short time away from becoming obsolete in order to appease a few disgruntled, head-in the clouds people with unrealistic expectations? Furthermore, they should release privileged, alpha-level information to the public in order to stifle their own development process for fear of receiving endless complaints for every experimental idea they toy with?
Blizzard is a relatively large game development firm within a larger corporation who's primary goal is to provide the best services to the most people in as short a time-frame as possible; that's how they make money. Rampant oversimplifications and selective attention paid to financial figures you do not possess is only a better-disguised version of the same naive generalizations that all essential boil down to one reality-denying assumption: Blizzard doesn't care.
I can understand why, in the relative vacuum of information within which most large and successful businesses operate, it is easy to assume mistreatment and neglect. However, given that any system as large and complex as Blizzard's must continually balance and maintain a plethora of interrelated variables as rigid as accounting or as fickle as the moods of the player-base, any significantly malicious act would be presumably difficult to hide.
What is more likely: Blizzard knows fully well what features they want to include in their game and are working their hardest to provide them in a polished and final form? Or they are secretly hoodwinking as many people as possible in the short-term to get their cash and run, thus sacrificing any long-term investment in future Blizzard products and services (WoW, D3, HoTS, Titan). Companies don't start from scratch, develop a loyal following, survive for decades, and become industry giants by playing "gotcha" with their fans and going "all-in" in the hopes of making a quick buck. Customer relations isn't a best-of-3.
While, yes, some features would be nice to have now, sometimes you have to wait. Console yourself with how happy you will be when HoTS is finally released with every feature you've ever dreamed of and more. Imagine the imaginary numbers you can then post complaining about how they've added to much and have overwhelmed the simple minds of their consumers, just to feel intellectually superior.
Lol? The only reason they're even changing shit for HotS was because of people finally making a conscious realization that the current WoL version was shit. Read what they said. They're making changes as a reaction to the public outcry, not because they've been working on this shit for 2 years and wanted to surprise us.
On April 26 2012 07:36 Alacast wrote: While, yes, some features would be nice to have now, sometimes you have to wait. Console yourself with how happy you will be when HoTS is finally released with every feature you've ever dreamed of and more. Imagine the imaginary numbers you can then post complaining about how they've added to much and have overwhelmed the simple minds of their consumers, just to feel intellectually superior.
Really ? From what we've seen HoTS will be sh*t so don't really see a reason for praising it that much.
can someone please explain why interface has anything to do with it being a competitive esport?
last time i checked noone ever said "man the GSL finals were great but its too bad there wasnt a chat channel for them to talk to each other" or "its a shame they didnt have a clan tag in front of there name"
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2 and that they continue to screw us with their customer support
Do we know this? Last time I checked SC2 is my favorite game to play, favorite game to watch, and competing in the AHGL was a ton of fun just because SC2 is such a great game.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: TLDR: blizz should hire me, i could make them millions more than they are because i'm not an arrogant activision executive
Right, b/c an arrogant TL blogger who knows nothing about game development would be way better than an "arrogant activision executive".
It really, really bothers me when people talk about SC2 sucking, or Blizzard not caring at all about their customers, or just greedy greedy Activision blah blah blah. Let me explain:
Blizzard only will continue to be successful as long as their customers like their games, enjoy their games, and continue buying their games. They have no choice but to care about their customers. Let's see what they've done so far:
1) Kept the map pool fresh, and have continuously improved the map pool since release. Long gone are the days of Slag Pits and Steppes of War. 2) Continous balance patches to maintain balance in the game. Sure, I know many of you will be like "BUT ZERG IS FAILING HARD IN GSL RIGHT NOW!" or "BUT PROTOSS GOT STOMPED AT MLG AND DREAMHACK!", but the fact is that the game is insanely well balanced given the differences between the races. No one below pro level should ever complain anyway, as it should be simple to look at your games and see how terrible you are playing, and see ways in which you could have improved your game and won. I'm mid-masters and I am terrible at Starcraft 2. My skill is so far below the skill ceiling it is painful, and yet I'm in the top 2% of players. Blizzard has done an AMAZING job with their game design and balance patches. 3) Experimented with match-making settings and used user feedback to determine which settings to use. 4) Added chat channels and occasional name changes. 5) Promoted awesome leagues like the AHGL (for which they donated the $5,000 prize to charity). Playing in the AHGL was one of the most fun and rewarding experiences in my entire life.
None of these things directly make Blizzard money. There is no subscription fee in SC2, and adding features to WoL is not nearly as important for their business as is making sure HotS is a success. That said, they clearly care about ensuring that the ladder keeps running smoothly so that players will continue to enjoy their game and purchase HotS when it comes out. Features like clan support and shared replay watching simply are not important enough, and too much work, to put into WoL at this point.
As Day[9] said at the AHGL Finals -- Thank you, Blizzard, for making Starcraft 2!!
How can you say with a straight face that this list shows that Blizzard cares?
Updating a map pool? Online Chat? Most of these things are standard in any online game. You think Blizzard/Bnet promotes leagues and tournaments? Go look at any recent MOBA title, dota2, LoL, all do a much better job supporting leagues and tournaments.
Its sad that few companies dare touch the RTS genre because of starcraft 2s "dominance".
Regardless, it seems Blizzard has lost touch with their roots (through Activision, or something else). Across the board their games are seemingly lackluster. WoW is fading, SC2 is fading, and D3 looks unimaginative. Maybe their losing their creative edge, maybe its activison influencing their plans, or maybe their time is just up. We'll see.
I'm not on the Blizzard hate train, because I love most of their previous games.I could say with certainty that any game before SC2/WoW:Cataclysm was pure gold, but I can't really say that anymore. I'll wait until D3/WoW:MoP releases but my expectations are low, and my faith in Blizzard is definitely at an all time low.
On April 26 2012 08:07 Forikorder wrote: can someone please explain why interface has anything to do with it being a competitive esport?
last time i checked noone ever said "man the GSL finals were great but its too bad there wasnt a chat channel for them to talk to each other" or "its a shame they didnt have a clan tag in front of there name"
it's hard to see how many clans could have formed had there been normal support.. i can point directly to client DCs during tournaments potentially messing up the results of the event, that's the most jarring of the complaint as far as it effecting "esports" directly
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
I agree with this...they've made it known that they hear the concerns that the community has. They definitely have listened in regards to gameplay and that's the most important feature of a game. HotS must take priority right now...unless people want a terrible expansion, it seems crazy to worry more about the improvement of social features RIGHT NOW as opposed to a game that has longevity through its content. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that everyone got so worked up about the social features lacking. That was because we had bigger concerns regarding game balance and the horrendous map pool. With patch 1.5 they're at least making an attempt to remedy yet another community gripe. Regardless, people won't be satisfied...it's how it always works.
They are trying to support the community...Blizzard certainly isn't hands off. If you want to see that, go look at any game published by EA. If you get changes from them, you pay for them. Blizzard isn't doing that with SC2 and this game, despite all of the negativity from some vocal community members has a solid base of players and a fairly well established pro scene. Find that with any other game on the market and then find me a company who continues to put in effort to ensure it stays that way. MOBAs are the only other exception at this moment and the money being pumped into their scene comes directly from the parent companies. With the market supersaturated with these games right now, that scene lacks any real cohesion. DOTA2 will fight against LoL just like FPS games fight each other. SC2 will change drastically with HotS which will bring in new blood and renew interest in the game. That is the most important thing.
As for the actual numbers that Blizzard is working with, I don't think they will make a bad business decision. It's funny how someone can say that they've turned into a greed-based company with no interest in their customers and then turn around to say that they're making a business decision that will be unsustainable. How can a company that is concerned with money to the point of near-intentional community neglect (supposedly) do something that will kill the eSports scene and stunt their income? I don't think they can/will. Of course Blizzard wants money...that is what they've always done. The $15 a year per viewer deal with Kespa has other factors that you simply don't know about. It would make no business sense to overcharge and I guarantee you that they aren't financially retarded. They crunch the real numbers...not just some hypothetical licensing fees and estimations on capital investments/salaries. The funny thing is, the OP would be infuriating if it were true. Sadly, one piece of information thrown in with hypothetical scenarios often comes out with unintentionally bias results. Talk about how terrible Blizzard is at supporting the community and how greedy they are...I personally wouldn't question their ability to make money. They know the price point for products and they understand how to bargain. Let the details work themselves out and it will probably be much different than any scenario people on a forum could come up with.
this is exactly the the apathy that I think is ruining both the community and the game itself.. blizzard doesn't give us something that we had 8 years ago like clan support or name change? oh don't worry they're a big company, they'll do it eventually.. region locking because it's "too laggy" where as iccup and valve and fish all seem to have it pretty well down? oh they're certainly doing the right thing for us. face it, blizzard doesn't communicate with us unless they're cutting features. "do you REALLY want chat channels?" tell me, how involved is the community with HOTS's development? we have nearly 7 month old information on units that've probably already been cut, why isn't development completely open so that they can atleast humor professional gamers' opinions?
their business practices are shaky at best imo, and how well sc2 will do in korea post SC2PL is still yet to be seen..
I am pretty sure somewhere pre-release it was widely regarded and accepted that region locking was more for the profits in the form of multiple purchases rather than anything else. Name changes and what not are not going to "be done eventually" as we all know the systems in place but rather they have once again realized it as a monetary opportunity for more purchases. But even with that they have loosened up and have given two name changes.
Blizzard just recently posted the HOTS dev update - they post everytime they decide a map change on the map pool, they do regular voting on the US bnet pages for these kind of things. Its as if you guys think that TL is Blizzard's page they need to have everything fed to. But you guys do realize a lot of the actual community interaction occurs on the bnet forums at a level thats more social rather than theory/updates etc. I get it you probably want them to come to your doorstep and knock on it to give you nice updates but truthfully they want their own community which is on THEIR site. You want the actual interaction with the people they PAY for this kind of info? Go visit their community they are trying to create on the forums first and you'll see the CMs etc do actually interact.
Also this is a thought shared by many devs (Including the SWTOR TOR devs who albeit did do stupid things share a common train of thought with most devs and they came out at said it during beta or at least something along these lines): "We know what we want done with the game and will listen to what we read but we do not have to take anything said as actual advice".
Now this is not the exact wording but similar. You say that the community should have a say in what occurs in the development but just by this thread you can see how bipolar the communities can be on certain subjects. With every person throwing their idea in you expect blizzard to actually take even half of their suggestions remotely serious? We have large enough of complaints in LR threads about Bronze heroes etc who don't know anything but want talk about strategy and balance like they know it all.
Also I don't get the idea of everyone insisting because BW is going down in korea SC2 can't keep going internationally. The large boom we saw at the start of SC2 was not caused solely by korean viewership. Its the foreigners that are the attractive market now with even korean leagues realizing the need for it (cooperation with mlg, gsl, ipl, dreamhack etc). It just seems like you are basing this entire subject on the vocal majority on a set forums (this) while if that was the case I would be able to say that every single game that's coming out of beta would be a catastrophic shakey failure.
On April 26 2012 08:07 Forikorder wrote: can someone please explain why interface has anything to do with it being a competitive esport?
last time i checked noone ever said "man the GSL finals were great but its too bad there wasnt a chat channel for them to talk to each other" or "its a shame they didnt have a clan tag in front of there name"
it's hard to see how many clans could have formed had there been normal support.. i can point directly to client DCs during tournaments potentially messing up the results of the event, that's the most jarring of the complaint as far as it effecting "esports" directly
aside from Lan support, which while not great certainly isnt putting a sword through the heart of e-sports, none of the other features people say are missing from SC2 is at all hurting e-sports
On April 26 2012 08:07 Forikorder wrote: can someone please explain why interface has anything to do with it being a competitive esport?
last time i checked noone ever said "man the GSL finals were great but its too bad there wasnt a chat channel for them to talk to each other" or "its a shame they didnt have a clan tag in front of there name"
it's hard to see how many clans could have formed had there been normal support.. i can point directly to client DCs during tournaments potentially messing up the results of the event, that's the most jarring of the complaint as far as it effecting "esports" directly
Clans form all the time. Just because there is no in-game "clan support" doesn't mean you can't pick a chat channel, make a website and start a clan. For example, I formed a Starcraft 2 team at Epic. How did I organize this? Well, we hav a chat channel and mainly communicate over e-mail and Skype if we're not in game. Do we care that we don't have some Epic team tag? No. Would official clan support help us in any way? Probably not.
It's like saying clans could never form in Counter-Strike without Steam groups. Steam groups are sort of useful, but no CS clan I was in ever used them for anything really aside from being able to have a group in our friends list to chat with.
There is something special about having 8 players from all over the world, Brazil, Korea, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Russia, Australia, etc. In the same game, playing 4v4, speaking the same language of RTS. Too bad for all you SC2 noobs, that is very difficult to do, not to mention the problems with 4v4 sc2 games in general. Only one recent RTS has been revolutionary in terms of gameplay and in terms of giving its players the freedom to play however they want with whomever they want. Now it is 2012 and people's computers can finally run it, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. The last RTS. No video game company will ever have the balls to try something like that again. Even GPG pussied out and followed up with the pathetic supcom 2. You probably don't have the balls to play it though, because your opinion is given to you buy noob reviewers who have never played the game, or noob players who ran screaming that the game is dead.
On April 26 2012 11:12 TRUESCFAN wrote: There is something special about having 8 players from all over the world, Brazil, Korea, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Russia, Australia, etc. In the same game, playing 4v4, speaking the same language of RTS. Too bad for all you SC2 noobs, that is very difficult to do, not to mention the problems with 4v4 sc2 games in general. Only one recent RTS has been revolutionary in terms of gameplay and in terms of giving its players the freedom to play however they want with whomever they want. Now it is 2012 and people's computers can finally run it, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. The last RTS. No video game company will ever have the balls to try something like that again. Even GPG pussied out and followed up with the pathetic supcom 2. You probably don't have the balls to play it though, because your opinion is given to you buy noob reviewers who have never played the game, or noob players who ran screaming that the game is dead.
ive never heard of the game, but from you jsut said about it i cant imagine it be any good if someone like you enjoyed it
On April 26 2012 11:12 TRUESCFAN wrote: There is something special about having 8 players from all over the world, Brazil, Korea, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Russia, Australia, etc.
There is something special about massive amounts of lag, and not being able to communicate b/c you don't speak the same language. I agree.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
I agree with this...they've made it known that they hear the concerns that the community has. They definitely have listened in regards to gameplay and that's the most important feature of a game. HotS must take priority right now...unless people want a terrible expansion, it seems crazy to worry more about the improvement of social features RIGHT NOW as opposed to a game that has longevity through its content. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that everyone got so worked up about the social features lacking. That was because we had bigger concerns regarding game balance and the horrendous map pool. With patch 1.5 they're at least making an attempt to remedy yet another community gripe. Regardless, people won't be satisfied...it's how it always works.
They are trying to support the community...Blizzard certainly isn't hands off. If you want to see that, go look at any game published by EA. If you get changes from them, you pay for them. Blizzard isn't doing that with SC2 and this game, despite all of the negativity from some vocal community members has a solid base of players and a fairly well established pro scene. Find that with any other game on the market and then find me a company who continues to put in effort to ensure it stays that way. MOBAs are the only other exception at this moment and the money being pumped into their scene comes directly from the parent companies. With the market supersaturated with these games right now, that scene lacks any real cohesion. DOTA2 will fight against LoL just like FPS games fight each other. SC2 will change drastically with HotS which will bring in new blood and renew interest in the game. That is the most important thing.
As for the actual numbers that Blizzard is working with, I don't think they will make a bad business decision. It's funny how someone can say that they've turned into a greed-based company with no interest in their customers and then turn around to say that they're making a business decision that will be unsustainable. How can a company that is concerned with money to the point of near-intentional community neglect (supposedly) do something that will kill the eSports scene and stunt their income? I don't think they can/will. Of course Blizzard wants money...that is what they've always done. The $15 a year per viewer deal with Kespa has other factors that you simply don't know about. It would make no business sense to overcharge and I guarantee you that they aren't financially retarded. They crunch the real numbers...not just some hypothetical licensing fees and estimations on capital investments/salaries. The funny thing is, the OP would be infuriating if it were true. Sadly, one piece of information thrown in with hypothetical scenarios often comes out with unintentionally bias results. Talk about how terrible Blizzard is at supporting the community and how greedy they are...I personally wouldn't question their ability to make money. They know the price point for products and they understand how to bargain. Let the details work themselves out and it will probably be much different than any scenario people on a forum could come up with.
this is exactly the the apathy that I think is ruining both the community and the game itself.. blizzard doesn't give us something that we had 8 years ago like clan support or name change? oh don't worry they're a big company, they'll do it eventually.. region locking because it's "too laggy" where as iccup and valve and fish all seem to have it pretty well down? oh they're certainly doing the right thing for us. face it, blizzard doesn't communicate with us unless they're cutting features. "do you REALLY want chat channels?" tell me, how involved is the community with HOTS's development? we have nearly 7 month old information on units that've probably already been cut, why isn't development completely open so that they can atleast humor professional gamers' opinions?
their business practices are shaky at best imo, and how well sc2 will do in korea post SC2PL is still yet to be seen..
Their business practices have them rolling in money. They are good at the business.
Playing between regions is fairly laggy (if you have seen US players on Korea or Koreans on US server you know this is true-remember TSL 3?). BW was a simpler game (for the computer/network), designed for use on dial-up (it worked on AOL!) so it can be run with less lag. Non-RTS games are not really comparable, since they do not have anywhere near the same number of variables (units, building energies, etc). Additionally, it is to keep people from regions with a potentially large number of pirated copies (China has monthly sub instead of single purchase) from being able to play in the same region as people who could buy the pirated copies (US, western europe). Disagree with this philosophy if you like, but it is to keep them getting money, so they can keep making more games, and, you know, being able to buy a new house or whatever.
As for development, they just gave a HOTS update about a week ago. Frequent updates are not helpful if they don't have much to say, and after the recepiton of the new HOTS units, I think they have reconsidered quite a few of them (as they announced in their update). They consult quite a bit with pro players, for example I have seen David Kim chatting up Minigun on his stream regarding balance changes. Boxer gave Kim a shoutout in an MLG game vs MMA! Clearly there is dialogue there. I understand if you think there could be more, but they talk with players. As far as dialogue with the community, it is impossible for them to talk to all of us. They talk to a select group of pros (Boxer has confirmed he is one of these), and read some of the forums, but the community is huge (over 4.5mil games sold!).
There is plenty more that Blizzard could do to improve SC2. But the idea that (a) SC2 is dead or (b) Blizzard doesn't care is a little funny, given how many maphackers they ban, how many balance changes there have been, etc. If you think you can do better, all I can say is that I hope you and Cecil go and found a company that makes an even better game. I promise if you do, I will buy it gladly =)
Shouldn't you allow for loss-carry over? Based on your spreadsheets, I am not sure you do. Are you accounting for cost-of-capital?
Anyways, without putting more effort into justifying your numbers, I am not going to believe you. For example, why is the assumption that you need a staff of 20 to finish the game a reasonable one? ...
On April 26 2012 11:12 TRUESCFAN wrote: There is something special about having 8 players from all over the world, Brazil, Korea, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Russia, Australia, etc. In the same game, playing 4v4, speaking the same language of RTS. Too bad for all you SC2 noobs, that is very difficult to do, not to mention the problems with 4v4 sc2 games in general. Only one recent RTS has been revolutionary in terms of gameplay and in terms of giving its players the freedom to play however they want with whomever they want. Now it is 2012 and people's computers can finally run it, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. The last RTS. No video game company will ever have the balls to try something like that again. Even GPG pussied out and followed up with the pathetic supcom 2. You probably don't have the balls to play it though, because your opinion is given to you buy noob reviewers who have never played the game, or noob players who ran screaming that the game is dead.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
Nah, man. They lost touch a long time ago. All they're doing now is providing lip service.
What they are banking on is the brand. If you played any one of their games prior you're most likely to buy into any sort of product they dish out.
Gamers are notorious for their poor consumption of video games.
It's a trillion dollar industry for a reason.
The same way the Apple loyalists keep buying Apple products without seeing the bigger picture.
They will keep making their money based off their reputation. Hiring the guy who did Live to program your B.Net 2.0 wasn't the brightest idea they've had and just like us, they're losing sight of the bigger picture.
Once again, Blizzard is providing lip service to make it seem like they have everything under control when in reality they don't. We see it in the interviews others have had with them to the press.
I have no doubt in my mind one of the things they are working on for HotS is a better U.I. but once again it will be very hit and miss.
It's not like this hasn't been a problem before for many gaming companies. Community Managers really cannot do shit. Unless a bug/glitch is very, very critical. The programmers will ignore it and move forward because it isn't one of their priorities.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
Nah, man. They lost touch a long time ago. All they're doing now is providing lip service.
What they are banking on is the brand. If you played any one of their games prior you're most likely to buy into any sort of product they dish out.
Gamers are notorious for their poor consumption of video games.
It's a trillion dollar industry for a reason.
The same way the Apple loyalists keep buying Apple products without seeing the bigger picture.
They will keep making their money based off their reputation. Hiring the guy who did Live to program your B.Net 2.0 wasn't the brightest idea they've had and just like us, they're losing sight of the bigger picture.
Once again, Blizzard is providing lip service to make it seem like they have everything under control when in reality they don't. We see it in the interviews others have had with them to the press.
I have no doubt in my mind one of the things they are working on for HotS is a better U.I. but once again it will be very hit and miss.
It's not like this hasn't been a problem before for many gaming companies. Community Managers really cannot do shit. Unless a bug/glitch is very, very critical. The programmers will ignore it and move forward because it isn't one of their priorities.
The bugs and glitches are what made SC:BW fun. ;D
Oh please, we can all agree that they could have done a better job, but let's face it, there is not a single gaming company that creates products of their caliber constantly... and providing content for their products.
And besides, xbox live is amazing. The designer did a great job there.
On the other hand, why do I even bother? People will keep complaining no matter what they do, and really, being a multimillion company they need to observe and make decisions carefully so that they don't have to go back on them.
On April 25 2012 08:12 Endymion wrote: We all know that Blizzard fucked up with Starcraft 2
Are you kidding me?
SC2 is probably the best game ever created - top 5 arguably. No matter how much you dislike parts of the interface or other minor issue, it is still a pretty amazing game and Blizzard did just about everything right which the games reception and community clearly shows..
Blizzard have consistently been creating the most well designed succesful games over the past decade, so I'm really having a hard time reading on with an opening statement like that.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
Nah, man. They lost touch a long time ago. All they're doing now is providing lip service.
What they are banking on is the brand. If you played any one of their games prior you're most likely to buy into any sort of product they dish out.
Gamers are notorious for their poor consumption of video games.
It's a trillion dollar industry for a reason.
The same way the Apple loyalists keep buying Apple products without seeing the bigger picture.
They will keep making their money based off their reputation. Hiring the guy who did Live to program your B.Net 2.0 wasn't the brightest idea they've had and just like us, they're losing sight of the bigger picture.
Once again, Blizzard is providing lip service to make it seem like they have everything under control when in reality they don't. We see it in the interviews others have had with them to the press.
I have no doubt in my mind one of the things they are working on for HotS is a better U.I. but once again it will be very hit and miss.
It's not like this hasn't been a problem before for many gaming companies. Community Managers really cannot do shit. Unless a bug/glitch is very, very critical. The programmers will ignore it and move forward because it isn't one of their priorities.
The bugs and glitches are what made SC:BW fun. ;D
Oh please, we can all agree that they could have done a better job, but let's face it, there is not a single gaming company that creates products of their caliber constantly... and providing content for their products.
And besides, xbox live is amazing. The designer did a great job there.
On the other hand, why do I even bother? People will keep complaining no matter what they do, and really, being a multimillion company they need to observe and make decisions carefully so that they don't have to go back on them.
Blizzard for a long-time used to set the standard for PC gaming. This isn't the case anymore and I'm not just talking about what Valve is doing. Lots of companies are starting to catch-up. Titan will have to reaffirm their status. Like I said earlier, when it comes to consumerism gamers are by far the worst. They will practically buy into anything, so I have no doubt in my mind that everyone will buy into whatever Titan is. It could be Hello Kitty Island Adventure all over again and Blizzard loyalists will still buy the thing.
For console it's amazing. When you ignore everything that made things work prior? That's what we call being short-sighted. You can keep trying to protect the products you love, but it doesn't change the fact that anyone can drop the ball and they did. Many times.
People will complain because that is what human's do. They complain.
The root of the problem is with the industry itself and that's why relatively small companies thrive until their studio gets bought out.
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
Nah, man. They lost touch a long time ago. All they're doing now is providing lip service.
What they are banking on is the brand. If you played any one of their games prior you're most likely to buy into any sort of product they dish out.
Gamers are notorious for their poor consumption of video games.
It's a trillion dollar industry for a reason.
The same way the Apple loyalists keep buying Apple products without seeing the bigger picture.
They will keep making their money based off their reputation. Hiring the guy who did Live to program your B.Net 2.0 wasn't the brightest idea they've had and just like us, they're losing sight of the bigger picture.
Once again, Blizzard is providing lip service to make it seem like they have everything under control when in reality they don't. We see it in the interviews others have had with them to the press.
I have no doubt in my mind one of the things they are working on for HotS is a better U.I. but once again it will be very hit and miss.
It's not like this hasn't been a problem before for many gaming companies. Community Managers really cannot do shit. Unless a bug/glitch is very, very critical. The programmers will ignore it and move forward because it isn't one of their priorities.
The bugs and glitches are what made SC:BW fun. ;D
Oh please, we can all agree that they could have done a better job, but let's face it, there is not a single gaming company that creates products of their caliber constantly... and providing content for their products.
And besides, xbox live is amazing. The designer did a great job there.
On the other hand, why do I even bother? People will keep complaining no matter what they do, and really, being a multimillion company they need to observe and make decisions carefully so that they don't have to go back on them.
Blizzard for a long-time used to set the standard for PC gaming. This isn't the case anymore and I'm not just talking about what Valve is doing. Lots of companies are starting to catch-up. Titan will have to reaffirm their status. Like I said earlier, when it comes to consumerism gamers are by far the worst. They will practically buy into anything, so I have no doubt in my mind that everyone will buy into whatever Titan is. It could be Hello Kitty Island Adventure all over again and Blizzard loyalists will still buy the thing.
For console it's amazing. When you ignore everything that made things work prior? That's what we call being short-sighted. You can keep trying to protect the products you love, but it doesn't change the fact that anyone can drop the ball and they did. Many times.
People will complain because that is what human's do. They complain.
The root of the problem is with the industry itself and that's why relatively small companies thrive until their studio gets bought out.
how can you say they no longer set the standard when every single RPG and RTS that ever comes out immediately gets compared to WoW and SC2 and falls short?
On April 26 2012 04:12 Endymion wrote: Sorry but I disagree with their model of doing things if it means that they won't support us between expansions, I would much prefer a monthly sub if it meant that they would update bnet. 20 and communicate better with TL and fans as a whole
But they are supporting us. I gave in my previous post a whole list of things they have done (map pool, matchmaking changes, AHGL sponsorship, chat channels + name changes). Something to add would be developer updates on Heart of the Swarm, which they have done to keep us in the loop about the development changes. You might want to pay a monthly subscription, but I sure as hell don't. And I think I got a huge value out of my $60 purchase, whether or not BNET 2 feels lonely. I love playing SC2, I love the super competitive nature of the ladder, and I love the fact that Day9 and Blizzard support things like the AHGL.
Just because they aren't adding major features to Battle.Net doesn't mean they don't care. Honestly, hiring more people to communicate on TL or the BNET forums would be a terrible waste of time and money, as the vast majority of people just want to complain about whatever they can think of to complain about. The battle.net forums are a wasteland filled with trolls and people suggesting the stupidest stuff ever about what they'd like to see in the game.
Basically, they did a poor job designing much of the BNET 2 UI. That said, they did a phenomenal job with designing the gameplay, balance, and matchmaking system, and produced a really well-polished game. Given their model (which you do not approve of, but which is the traditional model, and does not require monthly fees), it does not make sense to do a major overhaul of BNET 2 for WoL. Wait for the big time changes in HotS.
But whatever you do, don't try to pretend like Blizzard does not care. "But JDub -- they DONT HAVE CLAN SUPPORT!" you say. Guess what? If you want to join a clan you can. If you want to go play in a tournament, you can. Everything that people are complaining about is, in all honesty, really minor features. Shared replay watching? Oh no, you have to e-mail the replay to a friend and sync it up over Skype. LAN? Oh wait, for 99% of players this does not matter, everyone has an internet connection nowadays, and SC2 uses very minimal bandwidth. Reconnection after a disconnect? This would not apply to ladder, as people don't want to wait around for their opponent to come back anyway (60 seconds is more than enough). It would be a really great feature for tournaments, and I would expect such a feature in HotS. As it is, it doesn't affect 99.9% of players, only pros playing in pro tournaments who are unfortunate enough to experience a disconnect.
The fact is, Blizzard is working on Heart of the Swarm, and simultaneously ensuring that the WoL competitive matchmaking system continues to function and gives players great games (map pool, matchmaking settings, balance patches). Meanwhile, a few Blizzard employees also showed up to spectate and deliver the $5,000 check at the AHGL Grand Finals.
It strikes me as absurd that people take all this and arrive at the conclusion that "Blizzard does not give a fuck about SC2", that SC2 is "a failure". I love this game. Sure, I'd love it even more if the BNET 2 UI was better, but really I couldn't care less about that. I log on every time so I can hit "Find Match", get an adrenaline rush and compete against someone of my skill level in an intense 10-15 minute battle. Playing SC2 is the most fun I've ever had playing videogames.
Nah, man. They lost touch a long time ago. All they're doing now is providing lip service.
What they are banking on is the brand. If you played any one of their games prior you're most likely to buy into any sort of product they dish out.
Gamers are notorious for their poor consumption of video games.
It's a trillion dollar industry for a reason.
The same way the Apple loyalists keep buying Apple products without seeing the bigger picture.
They will keep making their money based off their reputation. Hiring the guy who did Live to program your B.Net 2.0 wasn't the brightest idea they've had and just like us, they're losing sight of the bigger picture.
Once again, Blizzard is providing lip service to make it seem like they have everything under control when in reality they don't. We see it in the interviews others have had with them to the press.
I have no doubt in my mind one of the things they are working on for HotS is a better U.I. but once again it will be very hit and miss.
It's not like this hasn't been a problem before for many gaming companies. Community Managers really cannot do shit. Unless a bug/glitch is very, very critical. The programmers will ignore it and move forward because it isn't one of their priorities.
The bugs and glitches are what made SC:BW fun. ;D
Oh please, we can all agree that they could have done a better job, but let's face it, there is not a single gaming company that creates products of their caliber constantly... and providing content for their products.
And besides, xbox live is amazing. The designer did a great job there.
On the other hand, why do I even bother? People will keep complaining no matter what they do, and really, being a multimillion company they need to observe and make decisions carefully so that they don't have to go back on them.
Blizzard for a long-time used to set the standard for PC gaming. This isn't the case anymore and I'm not just talking about what Valve is doing. Lots of companies are starting to catch-up. Titan will have to reaffirm their status. Like I said earlier, when it comes to consumerism gamers are by far the worst. They will practically buy into anything, so I have no doubt in my mind that everyone will buy into whatever Titan is. It could be Hello Kitty Island Adventure all over again and Blizzard loyalists will still buy the thing.
For console it's amazing. When you ignore everything that made things work prior? That's what we call being short-sighted. You can keep trying to protect the products you love, but it doesn't change the fact that anyone can drop the ball and they did. Many times.
People will complain because that is what human's do. They complain.
The root of the problem is with the industry itself and that's why relatively small companies thrive until their studio gets bought out.
how can you say they no longer set the standard when every single RPG and RTS that ever comes out immediately gets compared to WoW and SC2 and falls short?
My sentiments exactly. All of their games have been rated 9-9.7 out of 10 on ANY gaming website. We can all agree on, that aside from SC1, which was great by an accident really (did they ask for 'progamer advice' on creating the game? no, those didnt even exist), SC2 is the best RTS out there. We _KNOW_ that there is not a single MMORPG that has come even close to the level of WoW aside from graphics, and even there WoW is arguably better since they've spent so much more time actually making the shit look good as a whole. Do I think MoP to be a cash cow? Yes. they're pushing it too far, but on the other hand, the content they'll be creating is probably awesome. They have 10 million subscribers. What should they do, stop adding content now that deathwing is dead? It only makes sense to provide content for the MMO fans while we wait for titan. D3 will undoubtedly set a whole new standard for it's genre as well. I'm actually ready to bet 100$ RIGHT now that there won't be a single respectable gaming site rating D3 below 9 out of 10. (If there is any 4 out of 5 star ratings, its only because they dont have 4.5) You think they rate the games high just because it's blizzard? All of the respectable gaming sites? No.
I get your point if your point is that Blizzard is no longer creating ground shattering games like diablo1 that were more or less the first of a kind type of games. However, with the video game industry being so massive and it being around for the last 20 years, isn't that kind of expected anyway? Regardless, they are definately keeping the bar extremely high, and while some of the things they do have flaws and don't make sense (chat channels), and the fact that they probably region locked SC2 only to get b.net 2.0 work properly with WoW (For WoW it makes sense to provide proper customer support for a subscription based game, and they wanted to make b.net 2.0 work with WoW, so lulz. This is my speculation anyway). However, even so, they continue to bring out amazing products with incredible replay value.
It's good that we complain because that's how they hear us, that's how they improve and thats why we even got those shitty ass chat channels, and that's why they're improving them now. However, many things how people judge them based on these things are just wrong IMO.
First of all, not every RTS gets compared to SC2. It gets compared to BW and considering how small the RTS market is compared to the other genres. Surprise!
The Activision-Blizzard executives said it themselves. They actually lose a lot of money producing RTS games because it is a niche market. The money has to come elsewhere rather than selling copies.
That's why you don't see a lot of other companies focusing on RTS and there were some good other one's like AoE and Armies of Exigo, but they stop supporting them after a while, whereas Blizzard left SC:BW with a few programmers who would step in from time to time.
*golf clap*
If that's what you mean by setting standards more power to ya.
MOBA and MMOs as I have stated many, many times now are going to F2P. NCSoft has decided against subscription fees for GW2 to net more sales and microtransactions for cosmetics.
Every game in the market has a shelf-life. You will always have those loyalists who stick around, but at the end of the day it's about making bank.
MMOs and developers are catching on quickly with what works and what doesn't work.
These clones you speak of aren't really clones and it's gaming journalists doing what they do best.
When you are a kid you will buy into what these game reviewers say. When you get older you learn not to take what they say at face value.
Those 9.9/9.8 you speak of yeah, like they know how to dissect an entire game in that lot of time they have to do their review. They barely scratch the service and in many cases they don't have a fucking clue and they all have their personal biases. Hell, I remember when PCGamer and GamePro would even tell you what their reviewers like and dislike and all that jazz. Good times!
Others like to pull the nostalgia card as we see with every other guy calling out an old BW player. Rather foolish, no?
Because many people played WoW first or Everquest or fill-in-the-blank.
They compare it to what they know when the reality is. Really this is nothing new. Just look at my opening sentence and what you said at the top of your rebuttal and you will see exactly what I'm talking about, lmao.
On April 27 2012 01:31 StarStruck wrote: First of all, not every RTS gets compared to SC2. It gets compared to BW and considering how small the RTS market is compared to the other genres. Surprise!
The Activision-Blizzard executives said it themselves. They actually lose a lot of money producing RTS games because it is a niche market. The money has to come elsewhere rather than selling copies.
That's why you don't see a lot of other companies focusing on RTS and there were some good other one's like AoE and Armies of Exigo, but they stop supporting them after a while, whereas Blizzard left SC:BW with a few programmers who would step in from time to time.
*golf clap*
If that's what you mean by setting standards more power to ya.
MOBA and MMOs as I have stated many, many times now are going to F2P. NCSoft has decided against subscription fees for GW2 to net more sales and microtransactions for cosmetics.
Every game in the market has a shelf-life. You will always have those loyalists who stick around, but at the end of the day it's about making bank.
MMOs and developers are catching on quickly with what works and what doesn't work.
These clones you speak of aren't really clones and it's gaming journalists doing what they do best.
When you are a kid you will buy into what these game reviewers say. When you get older you learn not to take what they say at face value.
Others like to pull the nostalgia card as we see with every other guy calling out an old BW player. Rather foolish, no?
Because many people played WoW first or Everquest or fill-in-the-blank.
They compare it to what they know when the reality is. Really this is nothing new. Just look at my opening sentence and what you said at the top of your rebuttal and you will see exactly what I'm talking about, lmao.
Once again it's a fool's errand.
Maybe it's because english is my second language, but I don't see where you're getting at with this. 'Blizzard games are not as ground breaking as we think they are if we just looked at them more critically'? Is that it? At the end of the day, if we had a blast then who gives a crap if the game isn't 'perfect'? So I 'only' had 9/10 of a time while playing SC2 today? Not like I would have had a better time playing anything else. Who cares if other gaming companies are doing catch-up? None of them seem to stand a chance against Blizzard's titles, and while they don't, what is the problem? (No, I don't deny that bethesda or valve doesnt make awesome games, but so far it seems they're making totally different games from blizzard anyway so they cant be compared)
Using game reviewer scores and ranks given by reviewing websites as a figure of merit is laughable. The way to spot a good game is to look at the difference between the user score and the pro reviewer score. If user score beats the reviewer score you know it is a good game and the other way around, no matter what the absolute values are.
In regard to people comparing all RTS to Starcraft, is laughable as well. Not everyone thinks that an RTS must come down to a clickfest on a tiny map filled with cockroaches. Blizzard is great, they did amazing things even with a limited game like starcraft, but people really need to open up their minds and their eyes and look around.
On April 27 2012 01:44 TRUESCFAN wrote: Using game reviewer scores and ranks given by reviewing websites as a figure of merit is laughable. The way to spot a good game is to look at the difference between the user score and the pro reviewer score. If user score beats the reviewer score you know it is a good game and the other way around, no matter what the absolute values are.
In regard to people comparing all RTS to Starcraft, is laughable as well. Not everyone thinks that an RTS must come down to a clickfest on a tiny map filled with cockroaches. Blizzard is great, they did amazing things even with a limited game like starcraft, but people really need to open up their minds and their eyes and look around.
Ha at clickfest and limited.
With regards to the comparisons those will never end. Gamers will always do it as I've said regardless.
Doesn't matter whether your HC or it's your first MMO/RTS experience. It will happen.
On April 27 2012 01:44 TRUESCFAN wrote: Using game reviewer scores and ranks given by reviewing websites as a figure of merit is laughable. The way to spot a good game is to look at the difference between the user score and the pro reviewer score. If user score beats the reviewer score you know it is a good game and the other way around, no matter what the absolute values are.
Not entirely true. Its accurate for probably 95% of the time. There was a PS1 game called Legend of the Dragoon which received mediocre scores, but most players who played it regard it as one of the best RPG games ever made (I'm one of them). On the other hand, at launch date the user reviews for Modern Warfare 2 was lower than the review scores because people were giving it 0's and 1's for simply not having dedicated servers, they probably never even played the game to begin with.
*deep breath* just got through the thread, turned out to be a pretty good read on a bunch of things around this topic ha. Kinda of funny by the time you get to the end you almost forget where this started : )
On April 27 2012 01:44 TRUESCFAN wrote: Using game reviewer scores and ranks given by reviewing websites as a figure of merit is laughable. The way to spot a good game is to look at the difference between the user score and the pro reviewer score. If user score beats the reviewer score you know it is a good game and the other way around, no matter what the absolute values are.
Not entirely true. Its accurate for probably 95% of the time. There was a PS1 game called Legend of the Dragoon which received mediocre scores, but most players who played it regard it as one of the best RPG games ever made (I'm one of them). On the other hand, at launch date the user reviews for Modern Warfare 2 was lower than the review scores because people were giving it 0's and 1's for simply not having dedicated servers, they probably never even played the game to begin with.
i remember that game, one of the best games ive ever played it was such an amazing game
On April 27 2012 01:44 TRUESCFAN wrote: Using game reviewer scores and ranks given by reviewing websites as a figure of merit is laughable. The way to spot a good game is to look at the difference between the user score and the pro reviewer score. If user score beats the reviewer score you know it is a good game and the other way around, no matter what the absolute values are.
Not entirely true. Its accurate for probably 95% of the time. There was a PS1 game called Legend of the Dragoon which received mediocre scores, but most players who played it regard it as one of the best RPG games ever made (I'm one of them). On the other hand, at launch date the user reviews for Modern Warfare 2 was lower than the review scores because people were giving it 0's and 1's for simply not having dedicated servers, they probably never even played the game to begin with.
i remember that game, one of the best games ive ever played it was such an amazing game
Fuck yeah, e-five.
On April 27 2012 04:19 mawno wrote: Wow, an entire blog of pulling random numbers out of your ass. Why is this blog featured?
Maybe because he's a writer for TL, or so I would presume judging from his icon.
Maybe if you had absolutely no clue about the gaming industry or how business works, this all seems to make sense. But it doesn't if you look harder into it.
I honestly desperately wish that I could stop playing/watching this game. Honestly it is only the community that keeps me in this game. Even if their was another RTS that came out it would probably not have many players and therefore not have an incredible community like TL has >.<
The problem is, and has been stated in the thread:
1. RTS games are not easy to make. Me and my friends re-made Terraria in under a month and were 2 years into College. It's not as technically up to the standards, but the core fundamentals are all in place and we could release a sick game based off of it by Christmas. To make an RTS game with a small indie crew, no matter how experienced, would never ever see their product come close to as technically efficient or complete as starcraft 2. RTS games are easily the hardest existing genre to get running smoothly, and SC2 has set a phenomenally high standard to beat. That said, whatever they have been doing after the release is beyond me, as some of the features the community ask for can be completed by a student in their second to third year in programmng courses. Possibly later for a non-video game programming course but still within the time of their studies.
2. Based on that, a budget to meet the technical benchmark SC2 has made is impossible to meet except by already established AAA companies, and it is still quite a venture for them to tackle something like it. That leaves the only way to make a new RTS king would be to 'reinvent the genre' or make something so creative and awesome that it hits a mainstream market. Finding the 'fun' of a game is too variable and unpredictable for any company to attempt, because every business is about profit. So to 'defeat blizzard', we would be waiting around for the RTS version of portal. some small indie group start something awesome, it gets noticed and seems promising enough to invest in.
in short, it will never be worthwhile to produce a game as technical as SC2, so to make a better RTS it would have to be more creative/fun + Show Spoiler +
(and in turn have the oldschool quirky engines which companies seem to smite from miles away)
, and come from a talented indie developer with a crazy sick game, and plan to have their project adopted/sold out by one of the big name companies.
It's going to be a while before we get a modern RTS to the caliber of BW, and as much as i hate to admit it, blizzard will command the RTS throne for quite a while to come.. =\
On April 27 2012 07:44 Warpath wrote: That said, whatever they have been doing after the release is beyond me, as some of the features the community ask for can be completed by a student in their second to third year in programmng courses. Possibly later for a non-video game programming course but still within the time of their studies.
You had me with you up until you said this. This demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of how actual development works in real world big-time companies. I'm a software engineer (albeit not one in the gaming industry), and even simple changes cannot just be completed by a student like some small change in an academic project, or indie game developed by 2 people. There is a whole process of designing, testing, UI design, management approval, etc. for any change, no matter the size. And some things may be more complex than they seem.
For example, take "clan support". How is this going to be worked into the UI (need a UI designer, need approval, etc. before programming can even start). Are people going to be limited to being in one clan? How will there clan tag be displayed? How will managing information about the clan work (more UI design)? Will the Battle.Net website need to be updated to reflect this as well (now you need to get the web team involved). Where will the information be stored in the BNET database? Will a new table be added, what will the design for this table be?
Other problems, like rejoining a game after a disconnect, or shared replay support, may be more technically challenging than they seem ("oh but BW had it!"), unless you know the inner workings of how replay watching works, you can't really comment.
On April 27 2012 01:31 StarStruck wrote: First of all, not every RTS gets compared to SC2. It gets compared to BW and considering how small the RTS market is compared to the other genres. Surprise!
The Activision-Blizzard executives said it themselves. They actually lose a lot of money producing RTS games because it is a niche market. The money has to come elsewhere rather than selling copies.
That's why you don't see a lot of other companies focusing on RTS and there were some good other one's like AoE and Armies of Exigo, but they stop supporting them after a while, whereas Blizzard left SC:BW with a few programmers who would step in from time to time.
*golf clap*
If that's what you mean by setting standards more power to ya.
MOBA and MMOs as I have stated many, many times now are going to F2P. NCSoft has decided against subscription fees for GW2 to net more sales and microtransactions for cosmetics.
Every game in the market has a shelf-life. You will always have those loyalists who stick around, but at the end of the day it's about making bank.
MMOs and developers are catching on quickly with what works and what doesn't work.
These clones you speak of aren't really clones and it's gaming journalists doing what they do best.
When you are a kid you will buy into what these game reviewers say. When you get older you learn not to take what they say at face value.
Those 9.9/9.8 you speak of yeah, like they know how to dissect an entire game in that lot of time they have to do their review. They barely scratch the service and in many cases they don't have a fucking clue and they all have their personal biases. Hell, I remember when PCGamer and GamePro would even tell you what their reviewers like and dislike and all that jazz. Good times!
Others like to pull the nostalgia card as we see with every other guy calling out an old BW player. Rather foolish, no?
Because many people played WoW first or Everquest or fill-in-the-blank.
They compare it to what they know when the reality is. Really this is nothing new. Just look at my opening sentence and what you said at the top of your rebuttal and you will see exactly what I'm talking about, lmao.
Once again it's a fool's errand.
i really love broodwar and blizzard games but i thought people ,when talking about anywhere outside of korea , compared every rts to age of empires
On April 27 2012 07:44 Warpath wrote: That said, whatever they have been doing after the release is beyond me, as some of the features the community ask for can be completed by a student in their second to third year in programmng courses. Possibly later for a non-video game programming course but still within the time of their studies.
You had me with you up until you said this. This demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of how actual development works in real world big-time companies. I'm a software engineer (albeit not one in the gaming industry), and even simple changes cannot just be completed by a student like some small change in an academic project, or indie game developed by 2 people. There is a whole process of designing, testing, UI design, management approval, etc. for any change, no matter the size. And some things may be more complex than they seem.
For example, take "clan support". How is this going to be worked into the UI (need a UI designer, need approval, etc. before programming can even start). Are people going to be limited to being in one clan? How will there clan tag be displayed? How will managing information about the clan work (more UI design)? Will the Battle.Net website need to be updated to reflect this as well (now you need to get the web team involved). Where will the information be stored in the BNET database? Will a new table be added, what will the design for this table be?
Other problems, like rejoining a game after a disconnect, or shared replay support, may be more technically challenging than they seem ("oh but BW had it!"), unless you know the inner workings of how replay watching works, you can't really comment.
of course i lack the real world experience. From where SC2 stands in its current form, art assets could be re-used and the initial engine framework is in place. I agree my argument was abstract from actual real world process, but it was still applicable for the sake of argument. If the guys at blizzard looked at any suggestion, easiest example: "put bw/wc3 chat into bnet", in the simplest form, chat channels are already in place, chat menus and windows are already in place, you just add some code that lets first users in channels have operator/admin commands, then spend a bunch of time making it bulletproof. Most of the stuff asked for is direct ports from previous games, so unless the producer wants it reworked, the design foundation is done and complete.
After rereading what you posted, i hope i didn't misinterpret what you were stating =\
On April 25 2012 10:28 dartoo wrote: Wait, your creating a game with 20 programmers? No testers? A lot the cost of creating anything in software is testing.
And for the game itself..Game designers, sound engineers, artists,voice actor, motion capture? You seem to think that creating a game is about putting a bunch of programmers together in a room with computers.
Cost of "Computers" at 30k? Visual studio pro licenses cost 500$ per dev. Even if you have a ton of discounts through ms dev programs, you'll still need a build server, source control, and bug tracking system. Oh and once your done with a few test cases, you'll need to automate them, so you 'll need a bunch of stuff for that.
5 people post release? I think you have more than 5 people on just battle.net forums answering queries . Plus you also have the cost of keeping a massive system like bnet alive(you might think it's broken, but it is still huge system).
A big problem in a field like this is attrition, and to deal with that you'll have indirect cost of HR work/management, corporate structure. I'm sorry but this just looks like you have no idea of developing anything software related.
I'm sorry Endymion, but this. Add to that the team making the 3D CGI videos, the cost of the servers, consumer support, quality check, account and billing department.... This is not 1985 with 3 guys coding a game in their garage....
On April 25 2012 13:13 bokeevboke wrote: I wonder how many programmers are in TL. Maybe we could do our own open source project. We will make the game as it should be, and who knows maybe it will work
I'd be up for that in a second. I completed my Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment with a major in Software Technologies (Programming) with Distinction at the end of last year, and have been working on a game with a couple of guys I met at uni, but I still have free time and would definitely be keen to contribute.
Also, something that no one has touched on, and I think should be mentioned, is the fact that this hypothetical game would not be released for 3 years. By then Legacy of the Void will/should be out and all the complaints you have could be fixed (could be a bit optimistic I know as people can always find something to complain about, but regardless you will have to compete with an entirely new product as well as the possibility of other good large company RTS's). Assuming Blizzard does pull their finger out and fulfill all of the reasonable requests of the community I seriously doubt that a new, small company could compete with 3 years of additional development on top of what is already present in SC2 on top of whatever development has been developed for HoTS.
I'd say a more reasonable/realistic model would be to create an Indy game in a much shorter time span with a lot less money to begin with in order to build a fan base and build yourself up into a larger company before trying to take on giants like Blizzard.
what... the... fuck why do people always ask and ask but never think about giving. Can you truly put a price on satisfaction if you force yourself the other way?
this is interesting, i dont really get the numbers, but the thing for sure is that blizzard just screwed starcraft 2 over in the areas like customer support and little things like clan support.
Reading this post made me cringe due to the flaws in assumptions that you made.
Also, I am tired of this SC2 vs BW debate that some of the Liquidians seem to always have to throw in. Wait untill Legacy of the Void is out, and Blizzard stops tweaking balance on SC2. That's when you can actually compare these games, as then they are both finished games. Untill that time comes, you just look silly discussing SC2 vs BW.