There's a difference, with Starcraft and Diablo and basically every Battle.net game, the actual game information is still stored on your computer, and more importantly the communication is still done directly through the end users.
Battle.net is basically a server that provides a pass through for the players one another, it does not do all the work on it's own. Think of it as a big bloated gamespy (back when gamespy was just a program for finding and connecting games). Most of the work is still being done by your computer (the client), this is why there is so much rampant cheating on B.Net. You are in control of most of the elements, not Battle.Net.
In an MMORPG, very little runs on your computer, or at least, very little of the game. Your computer handles drawing stuff on the screen, and it handles playing music, and it handles sending messages ot the server, but that's about it. The server is the game world, and it has to communicate and work with every player logged on to the game simultaneously, in addition to making sure the players can see, talk, and interact with one another simultaneously. All of your character data is there, and everything that happens to your character is determined there. All of this costs a tremendous amount of upkeep, and since everytime the player plays it adds to the workload, it seems logical that we should have to pay to play.
-F.
DamRho Wrote:
Blizzard's Battle.net has maintenance costs and we're playing games for free. Games like Starcraft and Diablo 2 have been released over 5 years ago and people still play them everyday (because they're free, amongst other reasons).
It's not only a question of maintenance costs to run the servers. |
