There’s a story behind the no lan play + mandatory account thing. As the article says, StarCraft was huge in South Korea.
The lesser known part is that most people there did not play the game on their home PCs, they played it at PC cafes (PC bangs). These establishments engaged in large scale piracy of the game, installing it on hundreds of PCs without a license. They used the LAN play feature to bypass Blizzard entirely. So the lack of LAN play and the account requirement are a direct response to mass piracy of their game in Korea.
The spawn installation feature only supported 8 copies of the game per CD and was only intended for personal use among friends and family. Those PC cafes in Korea were renting out the game 24/7 as a commercial operation.
One may wonder if you should respond at all, given how well it played out for StarCraft in Korea. Sometimes what you see as an impediment is in fact the essential part of the success.
The game being a big hit in SK is nice theoretically but doesn't mean you can afford to develop patches or sequels if nobody is actually buying copies of it.
SC was successful in large part thanks to the community, so maybe to replicate the success, game developers need to figure out how to recreate the same thing and coexist with a robust community. I think monthly subscriptions are an absolute blocker for some great community contributions, for example.
What are you talking about? At least 4.5 million copies were sold in SK. The question is, did lan clubs reduce or increase the sales? It's hard to know for sure, since no AB-test was made but I strongly suspect that they did increase the sales by a huge amount even if the clubs themselves didn't buy a single copy. Give 'em the razor, sell 'em the blades.
That combination is also when I stopped playing blizzard games, except for a short stint with Hearthstone. I also wonder how many were lost because they didn't continue to cater to the core player base.
Or maybe they did, and people like you and me were just left behind. Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
>Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
I think this is it more than anything. If all you know is "quick match" matchmaking, it's hard to realize what you're missing. LAN parties were really awesome.
I did one (bunch of 35 yo guys) a few weeks ago, and it’s still just as awesome as before. It’s just a shame you cannot play any game released in the past 15 or so years, so you go back to Warcraft III :/
It killed it for me also, and really gaming in general.
If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine. And the whole thing with StarCraft for me and my friends is that this was our thing.
Several of us are now network engineers because we had to learn that skillset to play StarCraft at a LAN party without lag. The phone lines weren't cutting it.
Injecting blizzard servers into the loop, to be tolerated without recourse, totally ruined it for those of us who didn't live near a decent ISP. We were so excited about the sequel and it turned out to be pretty much unplayable online.
On one hand, open source thrives in a very well connected computer world, on the other hand, the fact that programs can phone home and update themselves every day has redefined software entirely, and not always in a good way. We are making much less robust software today. Both because it relies on connectivity, and because we can ship it first and fix it later.
and no lan play.
wonder if that kind of friction kills things.