While not still in college myself, I was enjoying the tide of students crying because Blizz is having open beta weekend the week before a lot of people take finals. Made my morning. =)
Seeing a beta test with such a potentially big audience (I'd say that a game as anticipated as D3 would get quite a seizable amount of people participating in an open beta), I would be willing to bet my hat(…) on the fact that we'll see D3 go free to play very, very soon.
I can't see that happening. Blizzard will still sell over 5 million copies of Diablo 3 at full price. Plus they don't seem as up on the F2P trend, what with even SC2 costing full price.
Also, I'd be annoyed that I just preordered it for $80 AU :(
Not before Starcraft 2 or World of Warcraft anyway. (And WoW is a six year old game that requires subscription, and Blizz still require you to purchased all previous expansions in order to enjoy the latest xpac, albeit at a lower price)
Why give it for free when people are willing to pay for it?
The difference being that Diablo 3 has an in-game real-money market, and more people playing the game means more people putting money into that market. The same strategy has been applied (successfully) with Team Fortress 2.
This is not a new idea, either. Free to play but in-game real-money purchases have been going strong with casual games since it became easy to send money over the net.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it's not an impossibility.
"Free to play but in-game real-money purchases have been going strong with casual games since it became easy to send money over the net."
Casual game examples cannot be applied to Diablo's model. They are between the game makers and the users (which is more similar to Blizzard selling their items for WoW).
Diablo 3 is unique because it's facilitating transactions between players, while taking a cut. Hold up, it's not the same as TF2 either. TF2 items are pure cosmetic, novelty. Items in Diablo will effect the avatars and in turn, effect other people as well in terms of game play. One can truely buy their way up, legally.
Another aspect is consider people owning multiple accounts. How many of your WoW friends/guildies own multiple accounts? Because of the nature of the game, there are obvious benefits to have multiple characters online at the same time. How many accounts does a TF2 player has? There's no reason to have more than 1 account because there's no unique player avatars, there's no attachment, no profession limits, no character limits. Giving away free TF2 accounts is different from giving away free D3 or even WoW accounts.
Each D3 account also have a limit on how much real money balance (Bnet dollars) it can carry. So if a person wants to deal in more money or more character slots (and there will be alot of them), they need to get another account – more money in Blizz's pockets.
The point is different game mechanics, different target audience have different approaches. What works in one may not work as well as in another.
No way. Being the third game in the series, they're not selling to casual gamers as much as they are to the huge existing fan base, and that huge existing fan base is more than willing to pay for the game. Blizzard would be stupid not to take their money.
Maybe in 2 or 3 years they'll be selling it cheap, but in the meantime they're going to try for every penny they can get.
With the game due out in three weeks, my guess is there's very little "beta" about this. Anyone have an educated guess when the game is sent to publishers for production? A day after beta ends? Already?
I think this is more like a demo or a way to get the game installed on millions of computers so that buying it is as easy as possible (a click away). I don't know about their publishing relationship but perhaps they get a better cut on electronic sales and this definitely helps increase those.
It's a stress test. When it goes on sale, millions will be able to buy it and sign up and create accounts, etc. This allows them to get statistics which will help them plan for a smooth launch.
This timing coincides with another open beta – TERA. An 'action' MMORPG that requires active dodging from the player and cursor targeting (instead of tab targeting like most traditional MMOs).
Diablo 3 beta will be easily completed in a day, all 5 classes, so TERA is a good second game to play around if you find yourself gobbling up the D3 beta too fast.
Fairly certain that you don't need to be paying, just be able to log into the battle.net site. This was the case for the signup and download for the closed beta.
It does not. They stipulate that even those that do not have a battle.net account can sign up for a brand new one and be eligible to test out Diablo 3.
From what I can tell there is no single player, just games that don't let other people join.
Even solo there is noticeable lag on every achievement and when moving/selling items, presumably as it updates the server. (Being in Australia we get screwed on both a higher price for the game and playing on a much higher latency that USA based players)
When not building iPhone apps or scaling MySQL, most of us play WoW or Diablo. Didn't you get the battle chest with your welcome to the valley gift bag?
