Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade
from the yeah,-that-doesn't-work dept
A bunch of folks have been sending in variations on the news that Blizzard has killed off LAN support for StarCraft II. The Buzz Saw points out that Blizzard seems to be taking the same old tactic of claiming that this removal of a feature is for the benefit of users, noting that this is "the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience." However, the company also does admit that it was a "difficult decision" and that a larger part of the reason may have been to "safeguard against piracy."Either way, this seems like a move that's designed to backfire badly. It's all about taking away value, rather than adding value (or a reason to buy). LAN parties using StarCraft were a huge part of the appeal of the game -- and even though there were many pirated versions out there, it's part of what drove more people to buy the legitimate version. One thing that we've seen over and over again is that any business that focuses on "safeguarding against piracy" isn't focusing enough on providing unique value to customers. It's amazing that it still needs to be explained in this day and age, but you succeed in business by providing more positive value to customers, not in taking it away just because it doesn't fit with your business model.
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Filed Under: features, lan, piracy, starcraft
Companies: blizzard
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How much do you wanna bet...
And besides what game maker thinks removing LAN capabilities will help prevent a game from being pirated. Sure as hell didn't stop people from obtaning and/or making pirated copies of old console games.
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Creating Market Demand
In short, instead of "fighting piracy" Blizzard has created demand for a product only available through piracy. Nice job.
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And that's saying something since I've been playing Blizzard games since I was 8.
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So it's not like Blizzard kill lan parties. But you will need Wi-Fi router and legal cd keys for everyone who wants to play.
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And what happens if their server go down or you service goes down, you can do anything even if everyone is present.
Steam did it right, you have to authenticate every now and then online, but you can still play offline just fine.
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@ kirillian, um no. Seriously don't talk about networking if you think your router is a magic box. Even the cheapest home router will not transfer in subnet addressed traffic to it's WAN side, ever.
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IF the software is smart enough to point to 192.168.1.51 as the receving party than yes the router will rout it inside (in fact it won't get to the router since windows knows it's inside the network).
If the software points to Blizzard's public IP (much more likely) than the router will not magically route traffic back inside. It will go back to the server and then back in. Routers aren't smart enough to know that 76.152.35.69 (random IP address) will eventually come right back.
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SC 1 = UDP only
Damn, I was planning on upgrading my PC to buy all three parts of SC 2 but crippling LAN was the last straw. Count me out.
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If there is no LAN I will not by this game. The most fun I've had playing this game is on a LAN in person. We were all hanging out together playing the same game, and that was always more fun than even playing with the same group of people over the internet. Because then we would always run into some other issue with people not being able to connect, or voice chat screwing up or something else. It then turns into a bunch of troubleshooting instead of playing and having fun.
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Tell me, as an investor: would you buy stock in a company driven by game designers without regard to profit, or in a company driven by MBA's focused on maximizing returns by developing very good games (but stopping short of perfectionism) while charging what people will pay, not what they would like to pay?
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I greatly see parallels in this to the other game studios. Became popular because they made great games, but ended up destroying themselves by trying to put the screws to their customers to make an extra buck.
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Re: Re: Let me...
Would you like 50% of $100 or 75% of $25?
Good games sell. Bad games don't.
If you're an investor, sure... that 75% return sounds wonderful! Until you realize it's 75% of a much lower amount because no one is buying your trash games and the company's reputation goes to pot.
Think back to the Origin's Ultima series... if you're old enough. A game company, run by gamers, who put out amazing games and made a good amount of money at it.
Lord British (Richard Garriott) betrayed and murdered his father and went over to the dark side of the force - ok, he sold the company to EA, and down... down it went.
Now, the only product they have is Ultima Online. The Avatars are turning over in their graves.
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Re: Re: Re: Let me...
The problem is that good games sell, but bad management produces such low returns that investors (aka owners) apply pressure to deliver slightly less good games at higher margins.
That's why these companies get bought by EA, Activision, etc. And why subsequent games aren't as good, in the eyes of gamers. And, yes, why companies like EA lose their way and become so business-centric that they forget they have to deliver very good games, just not perfect ones, to maximize revenue.
But a company run by game designers sounds like a terrible investment, because the vast majority of game devs don't have the business skills to do all of the other stuff a company has to do: raise capital, market a product, operate customer support, and so on.
All I'm saying is that poor management will sink a company, and as an investor I'm more optimistic about EA's ability to improve revenues than I am about small studios' ability to produce any ROI at all... until they sell to one of the big guys.
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If investors think they know better they should invest in a company that will actually need management changes. Blizzard has a very strong reputation for only producing games of the highest qualities.
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The sad part is that probably most Blizz employees KNOW its bullshit yet they don't have the balls to speak out against it.
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Well, sort of
And as a veteran of software dev, it's not at all implausible that this is just triage. This is a game that's been in development for six years... it's possible they either found that LAN support was turning out poorly, or that they realized they had to cut *something* to make it to market.
And, on the piracy angle, it may be that they found that as much as some people loved LAN parties, the number of people refusing to buy the game without that feature is tiny compared to the cost of developing and supporting the feature. That's a totally reasonable economic decision to make.
I'm not defending them, and I agree that the "for your own good" canard is so tired and transparently false that it damages the brand. I'm just not quite ready to say that deciding not to bring a feature to market is the same as removing an existing feature from existing users who have already paid.
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Re: Well, sort of
Anyway, this really does stink of "anti-piracy" by execs. There's a relatively small perceived market for the LAN games and most content execs are so irrationally scared of "piracy" that they'll happily kill off features if it helps them justify sales figures.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but this is the sort of decision we have come to expect in the DRM-obsessed PC gaming world despite the fact that it's likely to increase rather than decrease "piracy".
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Re: Re: Well, sort of
Those backend servers are almost certainly not remotely related to the code shipped in-game. So stuff like anti-cheat, timing, etc, is all going to be re-implemented for a local versus remote version.
I could be wrong there; I don't know Starcraft 2 in particular.
My guess is that they figured they could offer some kind of "virtual LAN" game whereby you all enter the same room and only see each other, but the game is managed by the internet servers.
I'm not sure it'll increase piracy, at least measurably. I can't see someone saying "I *would* buy it, and I still want to play it, but now I don't want to pay." Sure, out of sheer petulance and spite *somebody* will do that, but it's probably a tiny percentage of their sales.
It certainly won't decrease piracy, though. I don't even see the argument for how it could. If the concern is phone-home, they could just build that into LAN games anyway.
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I wouldn't. The servers would be doing the same exact coding as the LAN server just more of it.
"My guess is that they figured they could offer some kind of "virtual LAN" game whereby you all enter the same room and only see each other, but the game is managed by the internet servers."
That's possible but there is no way for the company to properly setup a virtual LAN that isn't reliant on their servers. Thanks to things like smiler network configurations (how many of you have 192.168.1.0 networks?) DHCP (how many don't?) and routers inside routers (DSL is setup this way a lot). The only way to work that properly and without problems would be to have a constant and consistent connection to the server. This brings up problems with slow internet connections causing latency between two people on the same switch.
"I'm not sure it'll increase piracy, at least measurably. I can't see someone saying "I *would* buy it, and I still want to play it, but now I don't want to pay." Sure, out of sheer petulance and spite *somebody* will do that, but it's probably a tiny percentage of their sales."
Can you say "Spore"?
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Re: Well, sort of
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Re: Re: Well, sort of
Most RTS games cap out at 8-12 people per match and thus are all made with LAN support, except apparently SC2.
What other RTS has come out in the last 10 years without this feature? I can't think of one and I love and have played a lot of them.
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Re: Well, sort of
This may be true, but it's besides the point. The issue is not why a feature was removed or even whether it was removed before or after the release. As you allude to, the issue is the blatantly transparent falsehood that these changes are made for the benefit of the consumer. Fair enough if you believe that removing a feature will help decrease piracy or that you're overbudget and have to cut a feature. But don't treat us like drooling idiots that will accept the lame line about doing it for our own good. That's the galling part.
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Not to mention they wanted it integrated with Battle.net - which is how they support their authenticators, trophies, achievements, etc. It's no different than Steam.
I really think this is a case of fanboys crying than anything else. No one has tried SC2 over Battle.net yet - how could you possibly know the experience won't be better than an old-school LAN party without first even trying the new system?
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Because there is *always* some lag over the internet. There is no lag on a lan. Plus, how do you know your 128kbit uplink can handle you and 12 of your friends playing at once trying to send up to battle.net over a tiny upload pipe. (no competition, that's ALL there is. Too far for DSL and no FIOS)
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Re: Like Steam....
I have to admit I always pirate games to try them. Most games that I play more then once I typically buy. I don't buy games that bring something to the table or have lasting power. I can see Star Craft 2 being one of those without LAN play.
I will not buy SC2 without LAN play.
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I participate in Starcraft LAN parties quite frequently. The decision to remove LAN play removed all incentive for me to buy the game. No, I am not so naive to think that the LAN supporter boycott will make a dent in Blizzard's finances. We are simply expressing our distaste with this decision and have chosen not to buy this game.
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idiotic
I can't wait to tell my friends who work at/own retail electronics locations if they don't already know about this (this is about a week old, Mike), as they will basically not carry the game.Sure as heck won't suggest it to friends either.
Sadly, Monitor making companies such as panasonic, sony, etc have been doing this concept for years (40+). Not only that, but when they add the "features" back in, they charge a premium for it. How do you think TV prices have remained constant at certain inch-sizes for decades (adjusted for inflation)?
Have there ever been companies that sold out, that actually didn't do greedy things after selling out?
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Re: idiotic
Sure they won't. I'm sure your friends working at EBGames and BestBuy have a lot of say in what the stores do and don't carry.
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One internet connection just won't work
Talk about lag time. It's simply not enough bandwidth to do it justice. You can't cram that much data through that small of a pipe to make it fun anymore. What a terrible idea. While I'm sure that Blizzard has done something to make the network communications more efficient, it would not be possible to make it so efficient that a single location lan party would be any fun.
RIP Lan party, we barely knew thee.
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More like the only reason.
They learned from WoW that by keeping people on your own servers to pretty much eliminate piracy
Days of games with LAN support are pretty much nearly over
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It smells like Activision taint to me.
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Not your Father's Blizzard
This is a bad decision. I still do LAN parties with StarCraft, and was really looking forward to doing it with SC2. Of course, I will still buy SC2, but now I will wait until it is $50 for all three games, instead of at full price.
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Re: Not your Father's Blizzard
Couple of years later, did the EXACT same thing with StarCraft.
Even Command & Conqure (WarCraft's Competition back then) did a similer thing. It came with 2 CDs, half the game on one, half on the other. They did that so you could lend a CD to a friend and play against eachother on modem play.
Oh how they've forgotten what made them great in the first place!
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The big guys lost awhile ago
Starcraft was great but nothing I have seen tells me they are really going to add anything to the game play experence other than some new units and some pretty graphics.
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Battlenet
2) Connection to battle.net is blocked at the university for some ungodly reason
LAN, even if YOU don't need it, is an essential feature to some of us. My roommate and I bought new starcraft discs mid semester and played via lan like crazy.
So lets see, I can't play LAN with my friends... I never play RTS games online... So that leaves it to a single player game. Now, I can buy this single player game - or pirate it.. hmm. -$60 for activision right here.
Why can't they just incorporate steam's model? That way I can authenticate when I'm off campus (where the game is not blocked) and play? Never thought I'd say this in my life but - Screw you blizzard.
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Re: Battlenet
Hence LAN games for RTS
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Starcraft 1 came out ELEVEN YEARS AGO.
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Yes it did. And lots of people still play it over LAN. What does that tell you?
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Plus at my last job some of us would stay late on Friday and play a few LAN games of Starcraft, but there is no way we could've done that if we had to connect to battle.net. As that was blocked, however since we could play we got 6 new people to buy this ELEVEN year old game just ONE year ago.
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MLG
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Re: MLG
Even without MLG what would stop some group from trying to somehow add in LAN capabilities. I don't know if that would be possible but if it is this is going to lead to people trying.
Assuming it would be possible to do so Blizzard has not only failed to eliminate piracy but may acutally increase the likelyhood of it.
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@ 4 Youd be surpirsed- but thats not even the point- they're taking out a feature that MANY people use- and saying its for the users benefit.
Even if only a few people used it- they should keep the option.
There should be a boycott, people want this feature and Blizzard doesnt give a shit.
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Starcraft is NOT a MMORPG
WoW got pirated plenty, lots of private servers were and are around. It's just not much fun to play a MMORPG without the'Massive' part.Big private servers may be fun, but they're still not as good as battlenet, being able to be part of a huge community made it very appealing.
You can play any RTS 1on1 just fine. So what worked for WoW won't necessarily work for Starcraft 2.
Could someone tell me how long it took for private WoW servers to pop up? A few months?
Do you think it will take more than 2-3 months at most before someone manages to make it possible to play on your LAN with Bnet emulator/bypass of some sort? It's a pretty popular game, so I doubt it will be long before users put what THEY WANT in the game.
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Chrono
from kirillian "Doesn't matter...most home routers are going to send the packets out the WAN side (to the ISP) before they bounce back after the ISPs gateway notices that the packets are headed to the same public IP that they came from...most home routers won't know to route the packets back inside the network...so...the bandwidth will be used needlessly anyway."
"my response @ kirillian, um no. Seriously don't talk about networking if you think your router is a magic box. Even the cheapest home router will not transfer in subnet addressed traffic to it's WAN side, ever"
This was in the context of a non internet LAN game. Kirillian has already stated "the packet came from the same pulic ID" I am not pretending to know how Blizz will code. I was responding to someone saying something to look like they know what they are talking about when they have no clue about my field of expertise. I am just trying to rebutt inaccurate information. So do not strawman it.
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I personally haven't been to a single one in 3+ years, and I used to put on a quarterly 200+ person LAN party with some friends in the DC area.
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I remember buying Warcraft 2 because.....
I wonder how many sales they would have made, but will not make due to the elimination of this feature.
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LAN via web
Every LAN party I've been to in the last 5 years has hosted the games over the web on a private server, rather then run through the headaches of setting all computers up on a local network.
I doubt they did it for any improvement, but rather for the raw costs. Why add a feature that 98% of the players will never consider using?
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Re: LAN via web
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Re: LAN via web
If you are all together all the computers SHOULD already be on the same local network and it is easier to setup a private LAN game of Starcraft than a private online game.
On the LAN no one outside can connect with you. In Starcraft the only way this works is if you add a password to your game that everyone knows so no one else joins in before your group does.
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Madness
On many occasions I was introduced to a new game via these parties, the cleverer ones (such as some of the old delta force games) used to allow you to play on a LAN as long as just one of you had the actual CD
End result - these games got played more as you didn't all need copies, on most occasions if the game was remotely good we would all buy copies so we could practice in our own time and not just be executed by the one guy who actually owned a copy
So the ability to pirate at LAN parties in effect drove us to buy more copies, games that didn't allow this often didn't get a look in. You've got to be pretty convincing with your one copy to get 8 guys to all rush out and buy it, whereas any salesman will tell you getting a product into a customers hands is a much surer way of driving a sale...
Buy then what do I know? I just played the games and bought them after all
And to the guys saying "just all go online", yeah great but meeting and being in the same room is way more fun, and if you are going to do that for most games you need a pretty good connection for 8 people to share from the same location
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Sean
But then again, SC over LAN is amazing, and SC2 can't be better than SC1, so just keep your old SC1 lying around and LAN after SC2 gets old.
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Hrmph.
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Control
It's a control issue. Somebody's making money off Starcraft? Blizzard wants to control the entire chain. It's foolish, but it's the type of foolishness you'll often see in companies.
It's not the first mistake they've made with Starcraft. They are splitting the game into three parts, and selling each for full price. If you want to play with somebody who has the 1st and 2nd, you'll need the 1st and 2nd.
They're seeming to act a lot like SONY did before the PS3 was released... which was the start of the worst series of ridiculous blunders I've ever seen a company commit. If I was an investor, I'd be scared.
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