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.

Comments

Will not be surprising

[kyrio]

If the crackers find a way to play before the start date.

Re:Will not be surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

"If the crackers find a way to play before the start date."

Indeed, white people can be very impatient.

Re:Will not be surprising

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It would be a surprise. DRM is hard because it means giving the user the locked box, and the key, and then trying to order their computer to pretend that the key only exists on every second tuesday.

Conventional cryptography is very much up to the task of just giving the user the locked box, presumably with a dinky little stub program that will grab the decryption key when it is released.

There have been attacks, or inside jobs, before, so the decryption key(or a few vital binaries, if they went with that approach, or used it to augment this one), could theoretically get leaked; but the task of giving somebody something on day X and only releasing it on day X+Y is theoretically unproblematic. You have to actively fuck it up.

Re:Will not be surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't buy Blizzard games to play single player.

I do. In fact I've never played any Blizzard games any other way.
I'm not a fan of the 'tank rush' strategy playing these games online requires
so I doubt i'll ever play one of them online.

Re:Will not be surprising

[Nursie]

You may not get into it for single player, but there are those of us who don't play WoW because we don't have the time and like a good offline gaming experience.

Not that I'm arguing for piracy here - If I want to play I'll buy - but online is not the only thing going and I hope they haven't neglected offline play. Knowing Blizzard though, they won't have neglected it because they do put so very much effort into making their games perfect.

Re:Will not be surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like my post didn't get submitted.

The install files are encrypted with a 21 byte key. I couldn't figure out which encryption scheme, but even if it was developed inhouse. Reversing it and finding a weakness would take a long time.

Like I said earlier. It fetches the decryption key from blizzard on the 27th. On said site is nothing.

Re:Will not be surprising

[binkzz]

So what?

People don't buy Blizzard games to play single player. Sure it's still enjoyable and a good game but you will spend the majority of the time gaming online. And you won't be able to do that on battle.net without a valid key.

Actually, Blizzard said that over half of the Starcraft players don't intend to ever play multiplayer. I tried my best to find you a link to show it, but I failed. I hope someone else has it.

I do have a link on Blizzard's stance on DRM though: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/28/0614256/Blizzard-Boss-Says-Restrictive-DRM-Is-a-Waste-of-Time

Re:Will not be surprising

[phantomfive]

They put a lot of work into single-player mode. Reports I've heard are things like non-linear story-lines, where choices you make in game change the story, and the cut scenes that have been released already make the story look good. You never know for sure until you play it, but all signs point towards a fun game.

Re:Will not be surprising

[N0Man74]

Does it? I have zero interest in online play for StarCraft. It's also worth noting that Blizzard is planning two standalone expansions, neither of which will be necessary for a complete online experience. That is, they're single player-only expansions. Blizzard apparently thinks, probably correctly, that most of their money is coming from people who are primarily interested in the campaigns.

Incorrect sir.

From the Official StarCraft II FAQ:

Q: Will we still be able to play multiplayer matches of StarCraft II with all three races?

        A: Yes! From the beginning, StarCraft II will be a fully featured multiplayer game, and all three races will be available for competitive play.

Q: How will the expansion sets impact multiplayer gameplay?

        A: The expansion sets will add new content to each race for use in multiplayer matches. This could include additions such as new units, abilities, and structures, along with new maps and Battle.net updates.

Q: If I buy StarCraft II but don't buy any of the expansion sets, will I still be able to play online?

        A: Yes. This will work similarly to Warcraft III and the original StarCraft, which maintained separate online gaming lobbies and ladders for expansion set players and players with the base Warcraft III or StarCraft.

Re:Will not be surprising

[ildon]

The only missing "features" in offline mode will be unlocking achievements, saving your progress on the cloud, and sending in-game and cross-game messages while playing single player. Not one of those actually has any impact whatsoever on the game itself (presuming you don't mind copying save files to a portable storage device to continue your game progress on another machine, which is a practice nearly as old as gaming itself).

and still

[phantomfive]

Wow, $100million dollars and STILL couldn't afford to include LAN play. No worries, someone will do it for them free ;)

Re:and still

[Korin43]

Some of the most entertaining LAN parties are in places with little or no internet access. My favorite was a cabin LAN party. The only internet access was via cell phone, and I can't image the charge if I had left it on the entire time.

Re:and still

[Midnight Thunder]

I can think of plenty of situations:
  - LAN party in a plane
  - LAN party while camping
  - LAN party in a moving vehicle, other than a plane
  - LAN party while on military deployment
  - others

Why should you limit you gaming to the presence of an internet connection?

Re:and still

[fast turtle]

Our Military is deployed to many different locations. Sea for those in the Navy. Then there are all of those deployed Overseas to various NATO bases. Internet connectivity in the barracks is pretty slim there. Don't forget about all the other stations such as the EWRS (early warning radar stations) in Alaska.

Others include Cruise Ships - Yes there are some cruises geared towards Lan Parties. 3-5 day cruises and people do pay for them.

Re:and still

[nmb3000]

Playing in network environments not hooked up to the Internet much?

Wow, fanboy much?

The simple fact is that there are MANY times and places where LAN support is very helpful, if not outright required. Several other posters have enumerated the latter, but for the former, you need to consider scale.

Sure, if you have 4-6 people playing then maybe going over the Internet to Battle.net is an okay (if lame) solution. What about a group of 20? 50? 200? Blizzard has repeatedly said they want Starcraft II to be a serious e-sport contender, both in Asia and in the US/Europe. During the beta, people trying to organize big LAN-style game sessions have noted that their plans completely fell apart when they discovered that Battle.net limited the number of players per IP address to 12. This might have changed, but the fact that they instituted any limit should be telling.

To pull this off, they will be required to implement some form of LAN play, something they've already said they will do:

"We will be addressing StarCraft II tournament functionality in a post launch patch to the game, soon after ship. This patch will include features to address the needs of location-based pro tournaments, but we have not discussed any specifics about tournament support beyond that."

Blizzard denies the rumors of a LAN-enabled "Professional Edition", but it sure sounds like that's the direction they're heading. On one hand Blizzard claims that "No LAN because Battle.net 2 is just so amazing we can't let anyone miss out!" and then on the other "Okay, LAN play is required but only high rollers get it, not the rest of you, you dirty pirates". Anyone who's played the beta knows how bad and lacking Battle.net 2 is. Yes, it's beta, but the final release is in less than 10 days. It's not like they're going to uncheck the "Battle.net sucks enabled" checkbox the day before.

I want to love Starcraft 2, but Blizzard-Activision is making it so hard :(

Re:and still

[icebraining]

What? You don't? So... you're expecting a commercial plane to allow you to pull out wifi or drape a bunch of CAT-5 everywhere to play games on the flight? What?!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_LAN#Peer-to-peer

I somehow feel our military has more important things to do than play Starcraft II on deployment.

http://gamepolitics.com/2007/11/12/military-wives-form-non-profit-to-equip-troops-with-video-games

The thing is, adding LAN play obviously is a drop in the ocean compared to the $100 million; they have all the network code done, it would simply be a matter of writing some code that instead of send requests for games to Battle.net, sending them locally.
The real reason is obviously to reduce "piracy" by tying the game to their online service, and screwing their costumers in the process, as it has become usual nowadays.

Re:and still

[timholman]

I somehow feel our military has more important things to do than play Starcraft II on deployment.

Troop boredom and depression during deployment in remote locations is one of the biggest problems that military commanders must deal with. They generally encourage any form of entertainment as long as it doesn't interfere with military duties.

In fact, if you have any old games you want to get rid of, go to www.anysoldier.com and I guarantee you can find thousands of enlisted men and women more than happy to take them off your hands.

Re:and still

[SethJohnson]

Piracy isn't the concern. It's the resellers.

When you purchase Starcraft II, you're not buying the bits on the disk. You're paying for the registered account to play through their network. If you try to sell the disk to Gamespot, it's useless. The purchaser will still need to shell out for an account to play on the network. Blizzard wants to ensure that anyone who plays Starcraft II pays Blizzard. Not a third-party retailer.

Seth

Re:Pillars

[alexhs]

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

Re:$10 mil per year

[waambulance]

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...

Adding more developers only makes a project later.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

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

Re:Just in case you were wondering why...

[Urkki]

...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...)

Too fast

[AlpineR]

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.

Re:This is what talking out of your ass looks like

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...