>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
>2010 starcraft releases with no LAN
>2012 diablo 3 releases with no LAN and no single player, all games are now tied to online servers, the game has an ingame auction house with real money
>2014 Heartstone is released, f2p, pay to get cards
>2015 Heroes of the storm is released f2p - always online, pay to unlock heroes or for visuals
>2016 overwatch, an always online shooter is released, lootboxes model
>2017 starcraft 2 becomes free to play with ingame purchases
>2020 Warcraft 3 reforged is released and sucks ass
>2023 Diablo 4 is a full priced game, with a 70$ and above price tag and ingame purchases, much like D3 it has no offline mode
The last full releases for Blizzard are WC3 2002 and WC3:TFT 2003.
Once WoW comes out it is all about making cash and blizzard never returns any of the removed features.
The monetization only grows.
This company has been pickpocketing people for 19 years. When will consoomers really stop paying for products, that live on brand name only ?
At this point international corporations are having lawsuits for rights to this company, due to the brand. Suits are arguing what profits they can make from this.
There is no soul, but there are international interests from corporations, lawmakers, commissions and etc stale old people.
How many other corpse companies keep a fanbase while being creatively bankrupt, but alive via suits expecting easy money ?
https://www.barrons.com/articles/microsoft-activision-blizzard-regulator-uk-eu-stock-a2c0c930
What are you even talking about? People play online games because of how much replayability they have over offline games.
I dislike Blizzard because they make shit games now, but the one thing they do okay is monetization. SC2 for example just had you buying the game and the 2 expansions, which actually were just legit expansions. Anything past that is cosmetic or audio stuff that you have no reason to care about if you don't want to. There are way worse examples out there when it comes to awful monetization, like Sims 3 with its THOUSANDS of fucking dollars of DLC, every gacha game ever, etc.
There's plenty of offline games with "full releases" being released all the time. People just don't play them past a certain point because they have a clear end point.
Offline games were tied to LAN play, which was done with friends you could talk to. Brothers growing up would have lan setups all the time.
Tournaments would happen via LAN, due to online connection issues. Some of which ruined the WC3:R launch in general. In D2:R they are translated into extremely slow runs due to load times.
SC2 became free to play, due to a terrible decline in playerbase. It's a non-factor at this point.
They did build a ton of datacenters for Azure.
Their competition for large scale cloud services and datacenters all over the world are Amaazon and Google.
More datacenters doesn't solve the infrastructure for consumers retard. Not everyone lives in South Korea.
You think they care ? As long as people can kind of connect, they don't care if the average latency makes competitive play impossible from half the regions.
They just need to have *some* service and *some* connectivity.
The people acting like having a theoretical monopoly on cloud gaming matters should care.
You can still bring your computers together and play with your friends or brothers, though. It's not like you don't have internet.
It causes actual issues with modding and makes it a chore for modders to host private servers, which I consider an actual complaint, but you didn't mention that.
It kind of comes with the always online thing but it is important, thank you for mentioning it.
Since the Dota2 lawsuit any blizz modder has seen how much the company has suppressed modding. SC2 mods to this day pale in comparison to WC3 ones.
LOTR mods with marines and dragoons is fucking retarded. Troll tribes with zealots is also retarded. But the limitations in models meant nobody bothered enough. Even now with some of the models in, the modding variety remains terrible.
You can do the hero unlock time calculation on your own.
Ok gays. THE MOST POPULAR subscription model at that time.
Are you happy now ?
The costs are too high and it becomes political easily.
t. some region of europe that has always had issue when playing with different regions from the dawn of blizzard games
>cloud gaming meme
Is Microsoft going to personally upgrade the global internet infrastructure?
>>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
what
bruv everquest had a sub and a PREMIUM server that offered express GM services and tradeable raiding gear.
Shit on me all you want. I did make a mistake.
The point is this was a huge shift in policy for a company that had made full release games with a single payment purchase up to that point and marks the end of the good era for blizzard.
The new always online / now games as a service model has marked a drop in quality, less features, more suits, more control for these companies and all the tiles under them.
>The new always online / now games as a service model has marked a drop in quality, less features, more suits, more control for these companies and all the tiles under them.
I don't actively play any old "single playment purchase" games exactly because they don't get updates.
I still regularly play many online games, published in the last 10-18 years because they get updates and there's new content.
>quality
Debatable.
>less features
Just factually false in most cases because the entire point is that the games get constant updates.
In general you have a weird black and white approach to this. There's plenty of "single payment purchase" offline games being released today. Just play those instead if you so vastly prefer them. There's a clear market and demand for always online games that keep getting updated as well. I play both because both have their perks.
The issue is the bait and switch blizzard did
>boom 2004 happens
Nothing is the same ever since. The pricing model changes forever and blizzard adopts the worst practices available on the market.
I have nothing against a full price game, that you get occasional patches and bugfixes for. But that is not what we are getting.
Not to Blizzard, Activision, Microsoft, Amazon or Google for sure.
In order for the concept proposal to be implemented or to be considered first, it must be worked out in detail, e.g. a business plan.
what bait was switched? was it the dance studio? cuz that's one thing i was salty about, i wanted my female blood elf to dance like a slutty goat or orc or night elf.
>we make full games, one time purchase - expansions are 1 time purchase
>2004
>full games are no longer an option
>LAN is no-longer an option
>post dota2 lawsuit - fuck you if you make something good in our custom editor
LAN being phased out is no fault of Blizzard, might as well blame them for for the loss of VCR and cassettes.
loads of games still support LAN just fine
especially games with high reliance on good ping
Well then go buy those? Much like the same people who whine about couch co-op being phased out by Microsoft and Sony, why not go support platforms that do end up having it and promoting that instead? Tons of AA and Indies exist on Steam currently.
>2015 Heroes of the storm is released f2p - always online, pay to unlock heroes or for visuals
complaining about a multiplayer only game being always online is reaching
>Heroes of the storm is released f2p - always online, pay to unlock heroes or for visuals
Or play the fucking game and still get both?
>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
Not even going to read the rest of your assuredly retarded post.
I also wonder why Blizzard no longer releases full-fledged master titles. The OW franchise isn't exactly that either when you look back at past masterpieces.
AO, Lineage, EQ, FFXI, Ragnarok Online, Knights Online, etc, etc all MMOs that predate EverQuest had a sub fee, RuneScape added membership 10 months post launch. You also needed a dedicated graphics card to run games like EverQuest.
>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
Do zoomers really? Everquest released in 1999 and also used a subscription payment model.
so did runescape
>>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
??
This was standard for MMOs such as Ultima Online and Everquest.
>all those Everquest chads
You guys are going to come play with us when EQ Classic Green v2 releases right?
i already played p99 and the first wave of progression servers and retail on/off for years. they've been talking about green 2.0 for 3 years now. it's on my "ehhh, maybe" list, aka probably not.
I hate the zerg guild that killed the whole server back at the start of green.
ah the classic tryhard sweaty hyper meta reddit guilds that always ruin all MMO from release since circa 2010
Nah, it was a zerg clan that just invited anyone high level and was full of angry gays.
>run with SA goons in age of conan
>we're kill on sight to every top end guild
>i run around doing full combo animation skips, one shotting parties of geared players
>half the guild gets banned for exploits and rooftop camping overnight and falls apart
i love new MMOs
>SA goons
have a nice day, SA goons are worse than redditors.
You forgot to mention Reforged overwrites the original version, fucking up TFT for people who have owned it for decades. Looking at that list really does drive home the shit they put into motion to appease shareholders and continue games-as-a-service.
>>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
Ah, time for a retarded zoomer history lesson
>>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
lmao
>2004 WoW releases with a subscription payment model, unique at that time
Why start with blatant lie? WoW brought literally nothing new to MMO genre, WoW itself is dumbed down EQ2 for lowest common denominator.
OP is gay
I had already come up with a concept of how to get away from the payment model and offer full titles again and not half-finished ones or Pay2Win models.
Who am I telling this to?
I just find funny that they think cloud gaming will work this time, it will be the fourth time it fails, even 3d has a bigger chance of returning
I like how the very first sentence in the OP is already false.
Didn't HotS have a buy all characters package like old LoL?
Blizzard and wow WoW, like Star Wars, are just dead to me now.
I went through all of the stages of grief -- my sea of outrage has dried up. Now, there's nothing left but a desert of fucking contempt for the entire IP.
I don't care anymore.
I just don't fucking care.
wild wild wild wild west desperados
>>2020 Warcraft 3 reforged is released and sucks ass
>booling down years of nonfunctioning features, broken campaign, custom map fuckery as the game 'sucking ass'
if you were actually mad you'd be far more mad. i didn't even buy reforged and i was livid for months
boiling*
Blizzard games were never that great anyways. Don't get me wrong WC3, SC, and diablo were all very good games at the time. But they weren't the only fucking good games, and as influential as they were I think it would have only been a matter of time before someone else would have figured out braindead "click to move your guy to this location and automatically attack" control schemes and shitty cooldown skills on their own. I find it funny PC guys make fun of console fanboyism at all when they have blizz and valve cock shoved so far down their throats. Never paid for a blizzard product in my life. OW seems like the only attempt they have made to create something new and creative in decades and they ran it into the ground and removed all the fun from the game in record time. These retards would have gone under years ago if they weren't carried by normalfags addicted to WoW
I have to agree. Warcraft 2, Starcraft Brood War and also Diablo 2 where the last REAL good game in their respective series. Everyone should have seen the writing on the wall when WOW came out and the corporation was making money hand over fist, that they would allow themselves to become greedy and forget their hardcore fanbase to then fall from grace later on. This was a foregone conclusion back then as it is now. Hubris exists.
i knew online would ruin my day when i typed power overwhelming and show me the money in my first multiplayer game