BlizzCon 08: New Battle.Net Will Have Fees
A new version of the multiplayer browser Battle.Net will debut with Starcraft II. How will it be superior to the previous version? Well, it’ll be able to hit you up for money.
During a BlizzCon 08 panel discussion, Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson said, “We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features. We kind of have to.” Blizzard wants to avoid putting in a subscription but yes, some as-yet-unknown features will cost money.
Apparently Activision really likes the word “monetize”. They’ve been using it a lot lately, first with Guitar Hero: World Tour, then with Call of Duty: World At War, and now Battle.Net. Guess they’ve settled on a strategy for their top franchises from here on out.
Quite possible the paid content for Battle.Net is something superfluous, like custom avatars for the browser. If they tried to sell special items or some such, an angry mob with pitchforks would gather. It’s also possible Wilson was talking about additional episodes for the game. Whatever it is, be sure to keep your wallet handy.
UPDATE:
Joystiq has a bit more information on this:
With Battle.Net we’re definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We’re not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We’re not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren’t core to the game experience, they’re really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you’ll have to pay extra.
