Starcraft 2: Split into 3, Good for Gamers?

Blizzard have announced that they are splitting Starcraft 2 into 3 parts that will be released (and sold) seperately. They are trying to portray this as good for gamers, much like Valve did with releasing "Episodes" of Half-Life 2. They say that the public will get to play sooner and the whole will be greater because they have more time.

There will now be a seperate Protoss, Terran and Zerg campaign and you will have to buy each one to get the whole story.

Myself I think this is a blatent attempt to screw more money out of a declining pool of buyers, getting them to buy the same product 3 times over and banking that most people will, having bought one part shell out for the others as well. In the same way that most people went to see the 2nd and 3rd Matrix films even though they were thoroughly awful, although thankfully this is dying down in movies now as everyone is sick of it.

What do you think?

Darkheart

..ill buy protoss and remaining two pirate copies..

Sounds like a strange move to me, certainly sounds money grabbing.

What about multiplayer? If you want to play as terran do you need to buy the terran episode? (etc...)

Hmm, a strange game, the only winning move is not play.

I'll stick to warcraft 3

I'll boycott the game for this kind of distribution policy.

Good old days are gone for ever?

I wont buy it till it comes out on budget as a trioligy

I see this as more of a money grab than anything else.

I guess the real answer will be in the prices. If each part is $20-$29, then it adds up ok, but if they will be $49+ for each version it's a bit crazy.

Eventually it will available as a single purchase trilogy as EdzUp mentioned.

Well I'm not going to buy it! (and was never planning on buying it anyway)

Like they need more money :D
They could buy a country. :)

Starcraft multiplayer is now doomed. I sense something like Battlefield 2...

I just hope they don't go subscription based on Diablo 3.. Oh hey lookie, they added the Wizard as a class!

While this decision may be at least partly a money grab, my thought is that it may well be a necessary money grab.

The cost of developing modern A+ games is getting to be so insanely expensive that the developers are probably finding that they need to squeeze every cent they can out of a sale.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see more developers using this episodic approach in future.

We may also see some deveolpers dropping flashy, high cost content, and concentrating more on quality gameplay instead.

Hopefully! Definitely for indie developers.

Wow. I think this is a definitely a money grab, and a very bad move on their part.

Remember? This is Blizzard, the company that prided itself on taking as much time and money as necessary to get a game right.

Very stupid. But this is what happens when companies get big and fat, and become driven by the big wigs in suits, Instead of the guys who are genuine gamers/dev's.

Well, I've read an article a few months ago on Planet Half-life that kind of stuck with me. Sorry, I cannot find the link any more.

Some big shot in the gaming industry claimed that the whole industry will change for the better, in time. He explained that the independent game development communities are growing and the quality of their products is becoming better and better.

He predicts that the independent developer can become a real competitor to the commercial industry because the products can be sold much cheaper because the developers costs are much lower. Also, the independent games, mostly, have a non commercial approach and often are more creative. This eventually would force the commercial sector to change their own way of development and marketing.


I'm no expert, but I liked the thought of this, so it stuck with me :P

Sorry to stroll off-topic here! :)

Blizzard reported an annual revenue of $1.1 BILLION dollars last year (2007 audited figures), now even if they are spending more than the most expensive video game ever, that's only $70 million (Shemue, 1999) which is incredibly small potatoes to them. Particularly when Starcraft (the original) is still practically a national sport in Korea.

They are gauranteed to make their money back on this game, I think this is simply a way to screw the customer for more money. If they wanted to have a bigger campagin, they could do what they have done before and release extensions via expansion packs (usually 2).

Darkheart

Maybe the game sucks. You'll be happy then you only bought one part of it, probably cheaper too than when they put the three parts in one game.

So yes this is good for gamers.

Yes this is what I wanted to say too.

Only downside is it's bad for the environment, all this extra packaging material and DVDs.

I'm pretty certain they will charge full price (whatever that ends up being for PC games) for each part. Otherwise they could just release a full-price game and then 2 cheaper expansions.

Also if the game sucks, you lost all your money on it, who's going to be happy that they bought a bad game?

Darkheart

That's ridiculous. First of all the cost to produce a good, is irrelevant to it's asking price. It will be as expensive as the market will allow, if that happens to be lower than the cost of production, it will simply not get produced. You think it's 3 times as expensive to write a console game than a PC one? Or twice as expensive to create a BD movie than a DVD? Please.

Secondly, World of Warcraft recently hit 11 million active subscriptions. at 15'ish Euro a month, Blizzard are probably quite well off in the foreseeable future. The problem is that in order to justify continuing development of non-MMORPGs you need to have roughly the same order of magnitude return on investment. If it's 100 times more profitable to make MMORPGers, then StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 are the last proper games Blizzard are going to make.

Personally I couldn't really care less. I think Blizzard have hit the creative wall, resorting to increasingly blatantly act of ripping-off Games Workshop, to the degree that you will actually hear people say that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, is a WoW-clone. I mean seriously? WTF? This creative bankruptcy, rather than any clever marketing ploy is the reason I'm done with Blizzard. Reinvent yourselves! You're killing PC gaming!

You missed the point by such a degree there that you're actually zooming off in the exact opposite direction, FlameDuck.

I'm saying that, when comparing apples to apples in a serious attempt to evaluate the situation; the comparable media and other development costs for a game like BioShock would have cost more than those for System Shock. That comparable Half Life 2 media would have cost more to develop than that for the original Half Life. Are you seriously saying that this isn't the case?

The models used in modern A+ games have higher detail requirements, for example. They have more layers to them (mesh geometry, textures, detail maps, shaders, etc). All of this adds up to more work, and more money. The devil (and the cost) is in the details.



Sure, but it's no good pointing at a standout success in the MMO industry, while ignoring the stinking pile of the corpses of failed games that have also tried to obtain that success - as well as the number of similar games on shaky ground that appear to be headed for that pile. You need to factor in the cost of the risks involved - not just the the profits obtained from the reward.

...oops!

I think hes simply point out the saleability of a product - the developers are aware of cost of creating a single high poly character - and of the
the overall cost of developing all the content. They know this before they, invest too much time...total unknowns are rare in business..

Its quite shocking given they have left it this long to make such an
announcement - claiming its better for the end user..lol, now that is funny - better cuz it will cost more? better cuz it probably wont work on
the latest version of windows by the time all its parts are finished? hah!

Its a simple business decision - they potentially increase revenue...
- each instalment will be pushed hard.. prolonging the shelf life of the
the original... i would imagine you need the original to play the
2nd instalment..and probably all 3 to play the final..

heh.. i dont really care - im also happy to wait for the budget release
of all three :)

Never the less, the unit cost is roughly the same, but the profits are significantly larger. Got any theories?

Read what I said more carefully. I'm saying it doesn't make a difference, because the cost of production, does not factor into the final unit cost. The cost of production factors into the decision to go ahead with production or not.

I wasn't. I was pointing out that the idea that Blizzard, who posted a record billion dollar profit, are somehow doing this because they're a bit strapped for cash, is a logical fallacy.

How are those failed games relative to why Blizzard are deciding to split Star Craft 2 into 3 distinct parts? At all?

First of all you can't factor in "the cost of the risks" because the risks are largely unknown entities (otherwise they wouldn't be risks) and thus attaching a price tag to it is pointless. You just have to make sure you can manage the risks.

If you have any business sense at all (which I'm guessing Blizzard do, considering they're way ahead of the competition) you start doing this in the planning stage of a project, not in the marketing phase of a project. Seriously. Nobody spends $150 million USD to develop a game and THEN determines whether it was cost-effective or not.

I'm guessing they didn't know until now. I'm guessing the reason they're releasing it now, with just one single player campaign, is because the rest of the game is pretty much done, and it would seem a bit wasteful to maybe postpone the entire release another year or two for the remaining campaigns. It's not really that different to what THQ/Relic have been doing with Dawn of War, and what I suspect they're going to do with Dawn of War 2 as well. For some reason it's just a big deal when Blizzard does it.