I remember Thor saying that not tying a single player campaign to a server would be bad for developers and Louis barely covered that statement here. How? How would keeping single player and any server-based systems separate hurt the dev? Just plan for this from the beginning. 🤦‍♂️

[–] proton_lynx 46 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yep. And wtf happened with LAN multiplayer? Even the Beta from Diablo II Ressurected had it, but they REMOVED IT from the release version. I call BS on what this Thor guy is saying.

[–] BreadstickNinja 25 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Blizzard swore off local multiplayer after what happened with StarCraft esports. The Korean leagues ran huge tournaments and made a ton of money off Blizzard's IP and essentially told them to pound sand. Now everything has to go through their servers so they control the ecosystem.

Same with how Blizzard now owns every custom game you make. They learned their lesson with DOTA/LOL and feel like all that money should be theirs.

All of which seems to indicate that this is a real problem. People can play Brood War forever, but what happens when the SC2 servers go down?

[–] proton_lynx 11 points 4 months ago

Which is pretty stupid, if you ask me. Owning the mods and custom maps just killed the community around it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I imagine fans have already found a way to create their own servers for that very instance. Just to ensure this type of stuff cannot happen to those hardcore dedicated fans.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

It hurts the developer by impairing the control over the deployed software. This can mean monetization (like microtransactions or some stuff), this can mean "drop-in multiplayer" or whatever it's called, this can mean a simple friendlist or statistics page, or something along those lines.

It is seldom something different from monetization. Especially in the AAA compartment.