Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch

Re:Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch by sushid on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @01:08PM (#15645844)

They're essentially the universal gaming app store. If you create your own store you're going to have to 1. provide a significant discount to compete and 2. have large names jump ship with you.

At this point, the only way a competitor has a fighting chance is if Origin or Blizzard starts opening up to third party games. Blizzard did that with Destiny 2 but it seems like they might only want to partner up with high quality dev work (whereas Steam is littered with shovelware made on RPG Maker).

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Re:Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch by methodover on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @06:51PM (#15648867)

I don't know about Origin or the Battle.Net client. Origin has a terrible reputation. Blizzard doesn't like to share, they're slow to move, and even though they're great at making games, they're not so hot at the services that go along with those games, generally speaking (remember VOIP in WoW?).

Discord seems incredibly well-positioned to take on Steam directly. They've got huge adoption in the gamer community. They're great at the community management side of things, as far as I can tell. They've figured out how to provide a better voice experience than pretty much any other service out there, so they're smart. If it's possible to provide the same thing that Steam does at less cost (which I strongly suspect it is), Discord could do it and probably make a killing at it.

And they'd save game developers a ton of money.

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Re:Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch by theandrewbailey on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @03:08PM (#15647038)

Origin has been selling third party games for many years. They sell Assassin's Creed and lots of indies.

https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/browse?fq=publisher:u...

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Re:Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch by justanotherbody on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @07:17PM (#15649007)

I use origin for the limited set of exclusives (sim city, mass effect3) and consider it the poster child of what not to do

Admittedly my usage is low. However twice I have encountered installer errors regarding permission issues

It turned out origin never created the root installation folder. Manually creating it yielded a successful install. WAT?!

I won't be buying anything further requiring origin until 2019 at the earliest.

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Re:Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch by jsheard on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @01:17PM (#15645931)

Destiny 2 is published by Activision, who also happen to own Blizzard, so Destiny 2 ending up on Blizzard's store isn't much of a stretch.

It remains to be seen whether Activision/Blizzard will open up their platform to independent third parties.

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Re:Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch by chupasaurus on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @05:00PM (#15648056)

Both Activision and Blizzard are owned by Activision Blizzard Inc. and are working independently besides game publishing (IIRC Blizzard used some help with Diablo 3 for consoles, Destiny 2 is the first non-Blizzard game on Battle.Net).

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