I don't think anyone is surprised at Kotick's dick-y quotes anymore.

"I strive to breed a culture of fear and thrift."

Yeah, I agree. It's just feels weird to pay monthly fee for an FPS game. [Even tho APB is not an FPS...]

really not happy seeing what gamers or gaming industry has become after COD or WOW released.

I would say GTA as well, but that game seems very well thought out and developed. I dont like it, but its good quality game.

Well it's in the Off-Topic section... which, now that I look at it from Elemental, isn't there. Elemental has a Misc section, that for some reason doesn't include off-topic. But from Sins I can see all the Misc stuff. More forum weirdness, I guess.

Sorry to burst your bubble, buuuuuut:

- MMOs were around, and financially successful, prior to WoW

- FPS players are dicks in general. Not necessarily 24/7. I know a girl, never heard her cuss once in 14 years. She plays an FPS and she's worse than I am. (Profanity and general unkindness wise)

- The gaming industry is just that, an industry. It has to make money to stay there. Admittedly, turning everything into a subscription is NOT the way to go about it. Booby Kotick is A. The Devil or B. A Corporate Megalomaniac, depending on who you ask (sometimes both!)

- COD didn't cause it either. It's Booby Kotick being in charge of the people making COD that is causing this problem.

It's easy enough to say, "if it's too expensive don't buy it." As depressing as these trends are, the only way to change these people is to not buy their product unless they change things. I've practiced this policy for a while now, and so far, there are enough good games out there without overbearing subscription fees and hidden costs to get me going.

I wasn't really planning on getting Starcraft 2 until it was cheap. I haven't heard about the whole charging for custom maps thing, which pretty much means I won't be getting it at all now. Which I'm fine with.

Listen, these people don't listen to complaints. They look at one thing only. If you want them to do something, hurt them in the wallet. The market only works if we as consumers are willing to withhold cash, because ultimately, consumers decide which business policies work and which don't.

To a lesser extent, it's like Warhammer 40k enthusiasts. They're constantly complaining about how expensive their hobby is. I guess it occurs to them to switch to another game, but they never organize themselves enough to do it. Meanwhile, their prices go up and up and up.

Charging for custom maps in sc2? Where did you read that? Have never heard it at all.

Yeah, and who is gonna make the CoD games now? Treyarch? Subscribing to something that might vanish seems a little bit weird. Yeah, and Kotick is dense and corporate. Not bad, just aware of how the maret works. I can point to the quote ZehDon said above. Or simply say that the free market strives to make as much money as possible. The consumers make the market and the market makes the consumers, supply and demand, etc. This is the world we live in, if you don't like it change it. I didn't buy mw2 or haloODST because generic fps is not something I promote.

I can't point you to the Blizzard post at the moment, but it's really not as bad as it sounds. Blizzard will not allow 99% of the maps to be sold. The pay-to-download custom maps will be those that introduce new graphics assets (tilesets, unit models, etc) and are essentially of professional level quality - which the vast nearly unending majority of all maps won't be Also keep in mind, it's not Blizzard that will be deciding which maps are pay and which are free in their user-submitted database. It's the map makers that will be able to *try* to get their map to be sold.

http://kotaku.com/5343006/blizzard-you-may-sell-your-starcraft-2-maps-on-battlenet-eventually

Activision has nothing to do with Blizzard. Sure, Activision merged with Vivendi (which owns Blizzard) and became the dominant partner, but part of the deal includes Blizzard not reporting to Activision:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16458

Or a more detailed version: http://www.wow.com/2009/04/12/activision-blizzard-is-not-blizzard/

That said, there's tons of scary stuff in virtually *any* Terms of Service agreement. Hell, for World of Warcraft they reserve the right to just delete your characters and accounts if they feel like it. But it's not like they would do it. Think of it logically - if they didn't let premium map makers see any money from sales, why would the map makers continue making premium maps?

Link?

Yeah, I saw that thread. Of course Blizzard kinda had to since Korea is where the bulk of the pro-gamer e-sports thing happens, so they sort of have to make sure their game can actually be sold there and not banned. They probably wouldn't have changed the terms if it was one of the leagues complaining, but who knows. For other countries? It probably largely depends on the consequences of not changing it. Germany for example also has a very large portion of RTS players, and if its agency that regulated what can be sold and what can't threatened to ban the game, I'm pretty sure Blizzard would change it too.

But that said, most of that stuff is really something that's not going to happen because at this day and age it would cause a huge public outcry. As I've said before, many EULAS and TOS (not just Blizzard's) contain lots of scary wording, but for the sole purpose of covering their asses from any conceivable legal threat. These things aren't written to communicate intent of action ("Hey we're going to take your custom campaign, put it in our next expansion, and make money from it!") but just to try and cover all the angles. It's not like they're going to start deleting accounts because it's a slow day at work on a Friday afternoon and they can

Firstly, Tippl is not the COO of Blizzard. He's the COO of Activision-Blizzard, the parent company post-merger. From first sentence of link 2:

Secondly, given that Blizzard was owned by Vivendi of course meant that Morhaime was not the top honcho overall, and still reported to someone at Vivendi. Now he reports to a different guy who reports to Kotick. That's pretty normal I would think when one company owns another, but it doesn't automatically imply that the owner is going to start messing with Blizzard. In fact, the third link points out this fact in two places:

Notice where it says that Blizzard remains an "independent" unit. And:

Pretty much sounds like Blizzard is still overseeing their own properties.

So if they'd just called the second and third ones expansions, it'd be okay? Like with every Blizzard release in the past since Warcraft 2?

This assanine "splitting up the game" stuff has gotten stupid at this point. All they did was pre-announce the expansions everybody knew was coming. For the love of god, stop spreading misinformation.

They didn't split anything. Starcraft 1 came with three campaigns. Starcraft 2 comes with one campaign that is more then twice the size of any of those, and significantly more sophisticated. Sounds like a similar level of content to me. Were people really expecting triple the campaign content in Starcraft 1? Because in order to be pissed off about the "split", that has to be your original expectation.