Starcraft II is a marketing nightmare. It is the sequel to a twelve-year-old computer game, a beacon in the forgotten era of Deus Ex and Baldur’s Gate.
SC2 is far from a marketing nightmare. Gamers are eager for a new Starcraft; Blizzard would have to screw up much, much more than online-only play for it to bomb.
Despite this, I agree with both you and the OP - few games have as much "cred" as StarCraft and I think Activision Blizzard have done a poor job marketing it despite huge anticipation. It will probably still succeed though since the game itself is actually quite good.
This is the battle.net expierence to a normal player now:
* Login
* Optionally start a group with some friends (who can be conveniently imported from Facebook)
* Choose 1v1 2v2 3v3 or 4v4
* Wait for the match to start
* Play a game
* Repeat or Logout
It's quick, it's fun, and starcraft 2 is going to sell because blizzard is a golden goose until proven otherwise.
However, why do you think SC2 has the amount of hype that it does? Why do you think that, ten years after release, the Starcraft Battle Chest is still #2 on Amazon's PC strategy sales rank (holy shit!) [1]
My guess is that the great majority of the word-of-mouth that keeps games like this afloat after the initial 6 months or so comes from hardcore players. This seems even more pertinent for SC2 in particular, since Blizzard plans on releasing it in three parts. If it can't hold people's attention for a couple years, they're going to be missing out on potential sales soon. They shouldn't throw away their loudest evangelists.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/StarCraft-Battle-Chest-Pc/dp/B00001IVR...
Addendum: Plus, remember that "hardcore" players of WC3 basically spawned off an entire genre (DotA) in their spare time -- it's not likely that anything of the sort would be produced on Battle.net 2.0 with the mapmaking restrictions outlined in the article above.
Sometimes it's nice to auto join a match with someone at your skill level, play for 20 minutes and log off.
It's the same type of change that went into WoW with the double XP gain bar. For every hour you're logged off, you get an hour of playtime where you earn double xp.
Also, in this article the author focuses solely on Starcraft II. BNet2.0 encompasses ALL BLIZZARD GAMES. Even World Of Warcraft is getting updated in the new Expansion to support some of the BNet2.0 features. The idea is to build a platform that connects all Blizzard gamers to all Blizzard games. At Blizzcon 2009 on of the VPs of Blizzard gave a demonstration of BNet2.0, talked about the vision, and where they plan to go with it. They are trying make a quality system that will be useful.
Lastly, BNet 2.0 will introduce a kind of Map Store. SC II's game editor is very robust and allows you to create some very nice custom maps, campaigns, etc. Map editors will be able to sell their maps on this store. I think this may appeal to some people on HN more than the article itself.
The main thing that people like about the Steam client now, as you mentioned, are the client's community support features. People also like the Steam store's frequent discounts. Steam community integration didn't exist until late 2007, and 2007 was also the first year that they did a major holiday sale. Before that point, most people were either neutral on the system, or disliked it because the client was a waste of resources. Its memory footprint was big enough to make a significant performance impact on older machines, which is significant when you consider that Counter-Strike, the most popular game on Steam at that point, was a game from 1999.
People eventually came to like Steam, but that wasn't until Steam began functioning as a service that added value to a product, rather than an impediment that devalued a product. The Battle.net 2.0 is plagued with many of the problems of the original Steam client, and it confers very few of the benefits that the present-day Steam does. People don't just hate the idea of it, they hate the very client itself and will continue hating it until Blizzard does something to fix it. Forcing it on the playerbase when it is still in its current unpolished state is making a lot of people very upset, and reasonably so.
Also: He focused on the Starcraft 2 features of Battlenet 2.0 because that was, you know, relevant to an article on Starcraft 2.
Additionally, how is Battlenet 2.0 going to "connect" Starcraft 2 to World Of Warcraft? How does your Starcraft 2 rank matter, at all, in World Of Warcraft? This is a genuine question, since I haven't played either game.
The only tie-in I've heard of deals with SC2 Collectors Edition. Purchasing it gives you a rare "Mini-Thor" pet in World of Warcraft.
The use case is that you can jump into SC2 and invite your 2v2 teammate to play with you even if they're playing some WoW character you don't know and you don't even have a WoW account.
Obviously, Blizzard isn't a fan of this, since it bypasses their copy protection as well as being totally out of their control. That's why they removed LAN, why they go after emulation projects legally, and I naively thought it was part of the reason they were motivated to make Battle.net 2.0 better. I liked their initial statements about why LAN was gone, where they said things like "we want to make Battle.net so compelling that everyone will want to be on it for all their games." Right on!
However, it appears that now they've done exactly the opposite. Battle.net 2.0 appears so unusable for any form of community or competition that I guarantee an iCCup or bnetd equivalent will be up a year from now, and the whole "hardcore" scene will be using it, and anyone will be able to pirate SC2 and connect to it. Why would anyone want this? It's not a complicated chain of inference; whoever is in charge, I'm sure they can see this coming equally well. Who benefits?
Homo BigCorpManagerian might beg to differ. I suspect the reason of all this insanity is very simple - decisions are taken by mid/high level managers who don't really "get" gaming or Starcraft and just live in their Excel Spreadsheets and such. The post even refers to this possibility in the initial paragraphs
"Fine, tell me it’s wrong to assume an Activision corporate culture would impact its corporate partner. You know, where the President of Blizzard Entertainment answers directly to Thomas Tippl, an executive who answers to Activision C.E.O. Bobby Kotick. The Bobby Kotick who disowned projects that lacked “the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential”. The Bobby Kotick who stated he wants to “take the fun out of making video games.”
Your comment is arguably less worthwhile than a factually incorrect comment- at least there's a point there to allow for a discussion to ensue. You just serve to quash discussion with a fiat "yeah, not up to my standards, pointy knees, you know."
This is a request to raise the level of the discourse. If the original is lengthy, directionless, and inaccurate, post something concise, direct, and accurate.
(I'd also note that somehow, when you essayed some actual thought (that I also replied to), you didn't get anywhere near the number of upvotes. Any thoughts? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1417708)
StarCraft II is trying some new things. They are taking control over more of the experience than they did before. That cheeses off a lot of people, but they have the opportunity and technology to do it and want to improve the experience in lots of ways instead of just the core game, which of course will be great.
The front end has been a mess by Blizzard's standards, I think. But it will evolve and get much, much better than its beta incarnation. StarCraft is a game that has held up for ten years plus and that is totally the intention on SC2. Blizzard released a patch for Diablo II earlier this year, so it helps to think about the long term.
And finally, Battle.net is an emerging network that's also in beta in its current incarnation. You can't serious if you think that it's not going to grow hugely in usability and capability in the next few years. And it's not like they're going to be supporting dozens of titles. Battle.net has got to be their avenue to making money off of non-MMO games, so they are very motivated to make it great.
In any case, I expect Blizzard to refine their products after release until they are perfect, just like they always have. Hopefully, they will continue to refine Battle.net 2.0 as well.
You know, even with online-play only I might have been compelled to buy SC2, eventually after the price comes down.
But without international play I will have no choice but to schedule when I play around when other people are playing. I stopped gaming regularly when I entered college, and now it's something I do every once in a while, when I need to disappear from life for a while - it's not scheduled, and I don't want to have to worry about scheduling unless I'm scheduling a LAN party. - also an impossibility.
So no dice. I'd rather hack on 0 A.D. http://www.wildfiregames.com/0ad/
I've been in the beta for a couple months. SC2 is great. The matchmaking is fantastic. The loss of LAN play doesn't seem that big a deal (to me) when compared to all the gains.
However, I feel that not being able to create a custom chat room for you and your friends to chat is a big miss. The chat feature of Battle.net 1.0 is probably the biggest reason why the Starcraft / Warcraft X / Diablo X community is so strong and so persistent. It is the various custom chat lobbies (friends, public, clan, special interest, etc.) that created the community in the first place. Facebook integration simply cannot compensate (and, in fact, seems rather silly).
My concern is that Activision-Blizzard is doing THEMSELVES a great disservice by eliminating chat rooms (well, that and the fact that I enjoy the community aspect). The reason I'm concerned is that I want the company to continue to thrive and make more good games. (That and also because I own a bit of their stock in my ROTH.)
Additionally, I think the lack of LAN play and aggressive legal pursuit of alternate servers is currently aimed more at getting Activision-Blizzard a slice of the eSports pie than preventing piracy. Anti-piracy is probably as solved as it's going to get.
The game is still super fun, and I still will buy it when it comes out.
If I wanted a more social game, I'd play an MMO.
