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StarCraft II Cost $100 Million To Develop
UgLyPuNk writes with news of a report that Blizzard has spent over $100 million developing StarCraft II. Initial development on the game began in 2003, and it's due to be released on July 27th. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick "described StarCraft as one of the company’s seven 'pillars of opportunity' (where each pillar has the potential to deliver operating profit between $500 million and $1 billion over its life span)." The finalized system requirements for the game have been released, and players planning to buy the digitally distributed version can download it now, though it won't be playable until the 27th.
If the crackers find a way to play before the start date.
Wow, $100million dollars and STILL couldn't afford to include LAN play. No worries, someone will do it for them free ;)
Qxe4
Well, if you RTFA...
1. Starcraft
2. WoW
3. Diablo
4. Blizzard's "secret new MMO"
5. Bungie‘s unnannounced new IP <- You missed that one
6. Guitar Hero
7. Call of Duty
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
None of these remaining franchises seem like 1 billion dollar winners, so what does that leave for the seventh pillar?
Well its got to be one of:
Given that its a gaming company, I'd be going with Greed
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i really dont understand why they used c++, when faster development platforms are available. python is perfectly adequate. so is AS3. look at farmville. kotick should listen up considering zynga just got bought by the google. mandating c++ is just a charity-case for old, bearded programmers who couldnt program their way out of an eclipse IDE. ah well. we cant all be smart. some have to drive on by with their gcc and gdb lunchpails in the special bus...
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Blizzard knows this, and thus they take their time. A lot of time they spend on their core values (gameplay first, commit to quality, embrace your inner geek, etc) requires constant communication, and adding people makes this worse -- communication channels increase geometrically as people are added to a project.
For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.
Not to mention that new employees require significant training, or else they'll introduce significant amount of bugs and flaws into a program or other creative effort. You can actually end up worse than you started if you have more bugs, gameplay issues, inconsistent storylines, and so forth to fix at the end of the day than the beginning.
This is called Brooks' Law, and was detailed in 1975 by Fred Brooks in the book 'The Mythical Man Month'. Wikipedia article is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
I found the gameplay to be great, but the attitudes of Battle.net players really turned me off. This is essentially the same reason I stopped playing WoW. The Blizzard gaming community as a whole may be large, but it is also comprised of many people with poor sportsmanship and overall poor attitude. I don't think any RealID forum plans (which have been rolled back) would have helped very much. Spoiled teenagers and socially maladjusted adults generally don't care about consequences.
The final straw in SC2 beta for me was basically as I was winning a match in 2v2. My opponent started going off on me, basically hurling extreme insults and some threats my way as I was destroying his base. I just stopped playing because this is basically the type of "gamer" that Blizzard seems to be catering to nowadays.
pretty much unanimously community thinks that bnet 2.0 is a hardcore fail, it doesn't offer features available 10 years ago in classic battle.net, like convenient means of communication between players or ability to play across region borders. What people get now looks like flash ridden XBoxLive imitation, infested with Facebook and people say you can actually feel lonely there with thousands of players. But hey, you can farm achievements!
That's what you get when your services are shaped primarily by Activision HQ and deals with Facebook, not by the desires of customers.
As to games, remember Age of Conan?
What's your point? For one thing, AoC is still around and kicking, including an upcoming expansion. As far as any of us knows, it may be a financial success by now, even if the player base has shrunk. For Another, AoC is a Funcom game, no relation of Blizzard/Activision. Which of course brings us to your next point...
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far
I think @gravos' sentiment, while badly worded, is correct. Blizzard seem to be really good at what they do and presumably the "cut-scene filler" will actually be something that helps sell the game. As for "pretty good hit/miss ratio", it's pretty darn fucking spectacular, calling it "pretty good" is just about the understatement of the year.
but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
Luck is getting 1 hit game. Smash hit after smash hit implies something more. As for the "hordes of loyal fans", I guess you're implying that no matter what Blizzard does, the "loyal fans" will buy and cheer? Just look at the recent RealID on forums fiasco and outcry on the WoW Forums, fans were certainly not shy about letting Blizzard know it messed up there!
So I don't buy it. I think Blizzard really are good at taking a concept and making a best seller game of it. I fully expect SC2 to both sell well and get good reviews (relative to the dated graphics it uses). My only personal complaint is that the game is expected to sell for I think $50 and will open only the Terran race in the single-player story mode, which means $150 for all 3 chapters and who-knows-how-long-to-wait for the next 2 chapters. To be honest, that's too steep for me, I'm going to sit and wait till prices come down and hopefully parts 2 and 3 are released.
I learn from all my mistakes, I intend to be a genius at the end of my life.
"Apple has used so few GPUs... Where does the 9400M and the 320M fall in that list?"
TFA:
"Mac Recommended System Requirements:....9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better"
Usually I'd agree, it can sometimes be hard to figure out if a 4890 is better than a 5750, etc, but in this case they made it pretty clear. A 9400M is not as fast as a 9600M, so while it'll play on minimum it isn't the recommended GPU.
FYI if you ever want to check just google "(BLANK) vs (BLANK)". Chances are you'll find a review comparing the two GPU unless one of them is so old it's not even worth comparing it with the other GPU.
Here's a great example: "PC Recommended System Requirements:... ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better"
So I googled: Radeon 3870 vs 4770 and found this review which shows the 4770 scoring 30%+ better framerates than the 3870.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
...you're gonna have to buy this game 3 times.
You're a sucker if you buy SC2. Go play something else. Go get League of Legends or something. Don't encourage this shit where you pay $50-60 a pop 2-3 times just to get an entire game.
Apparently you don't understand. It's very simple really. It's Starcraft. S-T-A-R-C-R-A-F-T. Everything else, such as life, liberty and pursuit of (any other kind of) happiness, is secondary.
(And no, I'm not a real fan, and I have no current plans to play or buy the game, just saying...)
I was in the beta program too and didn't enjoy it much either. I'd play a game or two and then quit for the evening, whereas with the original Starcraft I'd get sucked in and play for hours (often into the wee hours of the morning and miss out on sleep).
One problem I noticed is that the game moves too fast. The units do so much damage that they kill each other or buildings in mere seconds. There's no time to send reinforcements, cast spells, or even retreat. Well, maybe pro players with 600 APM can do that stuff, but for an average player the battles are over before you even get the alert that they've started.
"digitally distributed version can download it now, though it won't be playable until the 27th."
My experience of this this of approach is unpleasant. While I talk about steam games, and while this is Battle.Net I am wary. Pre downloading then activating on the day of release for left 4 dead 2 was terrible. It probaly has something to do with time zones as the "27th" will occur a half day before for me(being in new zealand). On that day of release the sun rose, the shops opened and the copies were on the shelf. I was not able to activate for another 24 hours. Some NZ'ers could but not me.
I note battlenet say it is "activatable once it goes on sale in the US". 07/27/2010 10:00 AM PDT
NZ'ers and Australians, remember, copies will have been on the shelf for one day, if that affects your decision to download (BattleNet downloader 3 meg. Starcraft 2 client 8GB). Ports required are ports 3724, 6112, 6113, 6114, 4000 or 6881-6999. so if you are in a restricted environment you will get "Tracker Not Responding"
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
The main reason that I would suspect a distinct pre-release cryptographic mechanism is that such have been seen before(I believe some Steam titles have used them) and that they are so utterly trivial yet so functionally unbreakable.
You would simply take the release installer, and encrypt a copy with a key known only to you(and probably stored on a securely-locked-away air-gapped medium, to prevent leaks.
Add a little stub program that does nothing but check your website for the key, decrypt the installer binary, and start the installation.(Because a key doesn't need to be all that long in order to be functionally unbreakable, it is even practical for those without web access to type a suitably encoded version of the key in manually).
Absolutely no "innovating" needed. Basically any encryption method that isn't declared "deprecated" will work, and implementations of most of them are available under pretty much any license you want. The total implementation time will be a few hours for a competent programmer(and it need not be a competent programmer who has any knowledge of the project, this is quite a generic thing), possibly a man-day or two if the decrypter needs QA on 15 different Windows localizations and some attractive splash-screen art. And yet, despite the ease of implementation, even three letter agencies won't be able to get to it until you release the decryption key.
Aside from the fact that it is easy and robust, the main reason to use a separate system for the "release date control" vs. whatever DRM is used post-release, is that market research suggests that the financial damage of having your DRM cracked tapers off fairly rapidly post-release. Having would-be early adopters downloading pre-release cracked copies instead of buying $150 "platinum packs" with a couple of useless trinkets is financially painful. Having cheapskates a year from now picking up off the Pirate Bay rather than Ebay is virtually irrelevant. In between, the value falls over time, fast at first, and gradually tapering off.
If the installer binary is encrypted, would-be DRM-hackers don't even get to look at the DRM until release day(whereas, if you depended on the release-DRM, they would have the extra 10 days of hacking done before the game is even supposed to be released). This means that the chance of a pre-release pirate version(barring a penetration of your systems by hackers or inside guys) will be impossible, and the time-to-working-crack will be 10 days longer than it otherwise would be...
Wow, that dude is messed up. I've never seen anything other than "gl hf" and "gg" playing the beta. Maybe you're one of the lucky few that had working VOIP?