Posted by
timothy
on from the please-give-me-a-driving-simulator dept.
PokeBlor writes: "Arena.net has an article by Patrick Wyatt, a Blizzard ex, that goes into depth about the creation of multiplayer games, ranging from replayability to lag. He uses good examples from Starcraft and Warcraft 2, two games that Wyatt was a designer on."
A b.net clone can let people with pirated serial numbers for games play a b.net game. Say I run a popular b.net clone server that doesn't check for the game's serial number, a hundred people regularly connect to it and only twenty five of them have valid copies of the game. Blizzard has lost out on seventy five sales of the game and the pirates have no penalties for pirating the game. Blizzard makes megabucks you say and thus seventy five less sales isn't even a market statistic. What happens when there's thousands of people running b.net clones each with a hundred regular users a majority of which don't have valid copies of the game. That amounts to appriciable percentages of revenues being lost. It makes sense to disallow b.net clone servers even if those developers personally aren't infringing on any of Blizzard's copyrights. Warez copies of Warcraft 3 are going to hit servers weeks or days before the game is actually released, if these people can connect their warez copy of it to a b.net server that doesn't give a shit who copies the game Blizzard is going to lose out on a ton of sales because there's thousands of college and high school students with fat connections who don't feel they ought to pay for a video game.
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A b.net clone can let people with pirated serial numbers for games play a b.net game. Say I run a popular b.net clone server that doesn't check for the game's serial number, a hundred people regularly connect to it and only twenty five of them have valid copies of the game. Blizzard has lost out on seventy five sales of the game and the pirates have no penalties for pirating the game. Blizzard makes megabucks you say and thus seventy five less sales isn't even a market statistic. What happens when there's thousands of people running b.net clones each with a hundred regular users a majority of which don't have valid copies of the game. That amounts to appriciable percentages of revenues being lost. It makes sense to disallow b.net clone servers even if those developers personally aren't infringing on any of Blizzard's copyrights. Warez copies of Warcraft 3 are going to hit servers weeks or days before the game is actually released, if these people can connect their warez copy of it to a b.net server that doesn't give a shit who copies the game Blizzard is going to lose out on a ton of sales because there's thousands of college and high school students with fat connections who don't feel they ought to pay for a video game.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.