Comments on: Starcraft II: No Beta This Year

By: ChampionHyena

ChampionHyena — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:54:38 +0000

That was at Vandelay. I love our super effective reply system.

By: ChampionHyena

ChampionHyena — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:53:56 +0000

I would argue that the reason that the multiplayer looks near completion is that the multiplayer is not new.

By: Vinraith

Vinraith — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:39:54 +0000

You say that as though Blizzard hasn’t done this kind of thing with every game they’ve ever released. It’ll turn up when it turns up, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was 2011, but there’s no way it’s not going to turn up at all. Based on the Korean market alone, publishing ANYTHING with the Starcraft name on it is basically printing free money.

By: Hoernchen

Hoernchen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:33:47 +0000

Oh, look, it’s Vaporcraft 2.

By: Davie

Davie — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:21:41 +0000

This sounds just devious enough to be true.

By: Klaus

Klaus — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:43:23 +0000

I think what Lagmint is simply saying is that you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

By: Carra

Carra — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:16:53 +0000

Not for us Europeans.

By: The Sombrero Kid

The Sombrero Kid — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:58:01 +0000

steam doesn’t compete with windows it’s tied to windows in many ways and so increases the lock in.

By: Gundrea

Gundrea — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:25:49 +0000

Curse you Cliffski. I showed Gratuitous Space Battles to my friends and now they’ve all gone and bought it. but I won’t have the €20 for at least another week!

By: bookwormat

bookwormat — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:59:53 +0000

@xabeon: good point. But I did not want to imply that there was a company wide memo like “we must boycott all other platforms to promote our own shit asap”. If that was the case they wouldn’t release their games on consoles ;).

I just say that if you are a big company and you have the chance to establish your own proprietary software platform you have to try. You do not have to make it your global agenda, but you need to try.

Google’s web applications and services form a platform which competes with Microsoft Windows, even though the platform is a not a desktop operating system, and even though Google has many applications which run on windows. Facebook competes with the Google platform, even though it is a very different beast. And Microsoft attacked both java as well as the netscape browser in the 90ties, even though these platforms where running on windows. Because they knew that every platform that lowers the dependency of users their own platform is a competitive product. You could also say that Steam is in some way competitive to Microsoft Windows.

By: xabeon

xabeon — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:19:59 +0000

bookwormat that seems like a pretty good strategy except for on caveat, Modern Warfare 2 actually uses Steamworks, the digital distribution platform for steam. My theory is that they want to work in conjunction with steam, not against it.

By: Capital-T-Tim

Capital-T-Tim — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:16:20 +0000

Earlier today I read a comment comparing for-pay pets in World of Warcraft to the US healthcare fiasco. Now we’re comparing a videogame publisher to the blood diamond industry.

GAMERS ARE THE MOST HYPERBOLIC GROUP OF CRAZIES IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY – NAY, THE UNIVERSE!