A lot happened at Blizzcon this year and most of the talk has been focused around the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft, mostly the pretty radical ways in which it will change the MMO, and around Starcraft II, mostly the new units and how the mod oriented Marketplace will work.
But the one piece of news that requires much more attention is the fact that those who are willing to pay for World of Warcraft for one whole year and get a special Pass from Blizzard will be able to get the upcoming
Diablo III for free when it launches, presumably via the Battle.net service.
The strategy here seems to be two pronged: on one hand the numbers for
World of Warcraft might see a bump, mainly because of long term fans who figure that they might get two games for the price of one for at least one year, and on the other Diablo III gets access to an audience, already familiarized with the mechanics behind the Auction house and ready to pay money in order to get ahead of the competitive field.
It's undoubtedly a good move for
Blizzard and it will probably give a boost to both titles but it might also be the start of something a little more nefarious, the move towards a gaming world where today's traditional big releases transform into sort of bonuses for long term projects, most likely MMOs or another class of game services.
Something similar is already happening with the Elite service from Activision, which offers quite a lot of new content for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for a fee and soon we might see the publisher selling Elite versions which comes with the game and the DLC attached, rather than the other way around.
The problem with this approach could be that for those who want their gaming purchases piece meal there might be a limited number of possibilities left.
Find us on Google+
No user comments yet.
Be the first to express your opinion!
