There is zero usable information here. Just a claim with no details whatsoever and a link to a petition.
You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
131–140 of 211 posts
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#132Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of us don't care and we just want to play vidya games.
You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.
Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere.
When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the place.
Once you move to subscription models, you can update games rather than constantly hype the next version. You have more consistent revenue streams and can give incentives to your devs to stick around. Valve doesn't quite have a subscription model (they make their money from their store), but does show how long-term devs working on the same game for many years gives excellent results.
As much as I dislike the idea of not owning games, I suspect it is the future, but the overall quality will go up as a result.
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
To frustrate those who legally purchased the game? It doesn't stop piracy, it makes the pirate version higher quality.
Denuvo seems to stop piracy just fine. Even when it doesn't permanently protect a game, it usually does so for at least half a year before getting cracked. That is more than good enough, considering most of game sales happen early after launch. Some denuvo protected titles haven't been cracked for years now. If anything I think denuvo is just paving the way for a pretty gloomy future of "almost perfect" DRM. It might…
> it usually does so for at least half a year before getting cracked.
but do games where the denuvo isn't cracked early do get increased sales? I mean that's the (purported) claim that the various DRM schemes were to fight piracy, with the justification that piracy resulted in lost sales
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#135What is the actual effect? Are your characters deleted? Is your legally purchased copy (license) of the game forfeited?
This is the kind of question that should be the top comment on HN. I'm surprised to see so much jumping on the bandwagon for an obviously exaggerated claim. note: I am not defending what blizzard is doing.
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose. I can't say that the interests of these groups are particularly close to my heart. Certainly if I was a game dev I wouldn't be willing to pass up a chance to substantially increase revenue to make life easier for an archivist. To the extent that there is any value in the history of this game, I think most of it will be sufficiently captured in the large amount of video content being produced about it.
There is, perhaps, room to question the tradeoff here. How sure are we that it was substantially increased revenue vs archivability? What if this sort of every-30-days check only increases costs without boosting revenue and hurting archivability? As is spelled out in context, this DRM check is not required for the game to function, and the ease with which it has been bypassed raises significant questions about how us…
By all means, question the tradeoff. But unless you're in a position to decide policy I'm not sure what good it will do.
> Indeed, DRM historically isn't noted for actually boosting revenue.
By this are you referring to comments on sites like HN, by people who aren't in a position to know whether DRM is beneficial for the implementor? If you are I'd just encourage you to interrogate your sources a bit. It's entirely possible that game devs have been in the grips of a collective delusion for the last twenty-plus years that DRM is often profitable. But I would say that to me that doesn't seem to be the most likely explanation for why they keep using it.
> It may also be worth considering ...
Worth considering, perhaps. But, ultimately, not an idea that is all that compelling to me, and even less so (apparently) for the economic stakeholders in game development.
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.
Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere. When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the…
Im not an expert in game development nor really a gamer but this still seems like a poor argument
> Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today)
Again not my area. So these are observations:
> there is a way bigger market than 1993
> there are different business models now
> gaming engines are widely developed
> software tooling has vastly improved
Sure things like server/infrastructure cost now must be accounted for. I just dont think its that fair of a comparison. Doom was a packaged AAA title for $60. You can definitely produce a game for that price today and effectively the price is like $100 after online and dlc and all this other junk.
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It benefits the user AND the developer Notably it benefits good faith developers. I.e., the developers we actually want making games. The developers that lose under this model are the ones that make poor quality games. Though I admit it does not solve every dark pattern.
Kinda, but it also incentivizes bad-faith gamers, which in turn disincentivises good-faith developers. There are a lot of games out there with a Perhaps such a system could work if it were based on a percentage of time-to-complete, but I have no idea how one would objectively determine that, especially before sale.
> a 2hr no-questions-asked policy is unfortunately often abused to return the games after completing them.
How often does it happen, though? I mean if you refund a game after finishing it, it's the same as saying 'I'd rather have pirated that game', not a good sign it's 'good-faith' game either
Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their IP and player base just got bought for 70b. They will make new 'blizzard' games, the way Disney makes StarWars movies. But I actually welcome it. Kotick has run blizzard into the ground, on the formula 'maximize profits instead of player satisfaction', which is the opposite of the formula that made the blizzard name. At least MS will, presumably, milk the IP long-term-responsibly.
Disney’s Star Wars series have been excellent. They bungled the sequel trilogy for sure, but I’m not convinced that they are worse for Star Wars.
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Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand. Have the servers been down ever since?
> Have the servers been down ever since? no, it works just fine. the issues the original poster highlighted had to do with launch problems.
Launch problems that lasted for about a month on a decades-old game. It's still absurd.