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so. Since the game was first officially announced,
there has been nothing to suggest that it is anything other than the third
installment of the series up until the announcements of the auction house
handling and the persistent connection. I will not say that the development
history which is public knowledge has been without
controversy. Even when it was announced, there was
consternation and even outrage that the moody Gothic feel of the first two
installments appeared to have been softened for what some dubbed a "World of
DiabloCraft" art style. Yet there is a world
of difference between the aesthetic choices made for a game's art style and the
fundamental method of playing the game.
 The
idea that such a persistent connection is somehow beneficial to all parties and
noble in purpose so completely fails to persuade that my impression of late has
been that you, or the individuals under you involved with the management of the
Diablo III development team, have in fact lost your ability to recognize
reality. Let's take an honest look at what precisely your proposition entails,
not as it operates in the ideal environment of QA, but in the grim and often
harsh environment that is The Desert of The Real. Just in the United States, at
the end of 2010, there were roughly 85.7 million wired broadband subscribers
according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or about
27.7 wired broadband subscribers for every 100 people. While the overall level
of Internet access may have risen in the US, the percentage of broadband
subscribers barely reaches a third of the total number of Internet users in the
nation. Granted, even if you could only get a tenth of those broadband
subscribers to buy Diablo III, you'd have an unequivocal hit upon your hands.
What you may have failed to consider is that precisely 0% of those broadband
subscribers has 100% uptime on their lines. What looks like a fine idea in the
highly controlled environment of the QA testing area, with perfect conditions
designed to isolate external factors contributing to bugs in the software, will
invariably fail miserably once that software is exposed to those external
factors you have controlled for up to this point. Sure, you can run a closed
beta test outside the QA environment, run a lottery to see which lucky fans get
an early look at the game, but even then your sample will be skewed. Your own
beta testing protocols will have a wide range of hardware, which you will be
able to control for in the process of hunting down bugs, but there will be a
wide range of Internet connections with technical and geographic elements which
you will not be able to control for. Scheduled downtimes, line quality issues,
natural accidents, human carelessness around fiber bundles, internal wiring
quality, all of these and more can and will
conspire to turn your latest work into a lump of wasted hard drive space on a
lot of computers. While some of the scenarios your tech support staff will run
into fall into the category of "acts of God" or can be easily ascribed to
external actors such as ISPs or careless utility workers, others will not be so
easily dismissed. Having worked in the tech field, I can very easily recall the
frustration of an ISP customer when they were informed that their internal phone
wiring was not up to snuff to handle their DSL signal and would require a
complete rewiring. The moment your tech support staff tells somebody who dropped
$60 on a copy of your game that they need to spend several hundred additional
dollars just to play the game they've purchased, either by upgrading their
internal wiring or suffering the early termination fees and setup fees involved
in moving from one broadband provider to another, that customer will very
bluntly tell your company to go pound sand. And they will be perfectly right in
doing so.
To further complicate matters, the ISPs themselves are a potential impediment to
the smooth functioning of this scheme. It may have escaped your notice, but
there are persistent rumblings here in the US by major telcos and cable
companies expressing a desire to be able to put bandwidth caps in place,
ostensibly to "manage" the loads on their networks. And while recent events in
Canada have proven that this argument is a farrago of lies and distorted truths
that poorly camouflages a desire to squeeze more money out of subscribers,
broadband subscribers in Europe are already operating under such caps, and I
cannot think that a single one of them will be remotely pleased that their
progress in your game is suddenly brought to a screeching and unsaved halt
because they hit their cap for the month. In a perfect world of uncapped
broadband with 100% uptime, insisting on a persistent Internet connection would
at least have the virtue of being technically feasible without undue burden. The
real world is far from perfect.
It could be argued that there is precedent for insisting on a persistent
Internet connection in order to play single player content. I would argue that a
bad precedent is not a good foundation to be basing any sort of strategy upon,
rhetorical or commercial. Ubisoft has, for the last few titles, insisted upon a
persistent Internet connection for their PC releases. Just as with Diablo III,
there was a rather large outcry over this disturbing turn of events. Ubisoft
proceeded heedlessly to enforce this new policy and they recently came out with
an exultant announcement that there had been "a clear reduction in piracy of our
titles which required a persistent online connection, and from that point of
view the
 requirement
is a success." You'll forgive me if I require large amounts of salt and a
generous portion of tequila to take Ubisoft's stated success at face value. The
qualifier of "from that point of view" strikes me as disingenuous. If I were to
lay money down on a wager, I'd be willing to bet that they're not outright
lying, but they're being considerably less than honest. If I were to double down
on this wager, I would bet that the number of PC copies they've sold is rather
less than what they sold on previous titles that didn't have the persistent
connection requirement. I would further hazard that while the number of sales
indicates a reduced absolute number of pirated copies, the relative rate of
piracy is rather higher than what Ubisoft is willing to publicly admit.
Ubisoft may have set the precedent, but there is a rather different set of
factors involved with Diablo III. The most obvious is that the community was not
strictly locked into the PC as the platform for titles like Assassin's Creed II,
and public comments in the past from Yves Guillemot and other executives at
Ubisoft have expressed a strong desire to divest of themselves of any presence
in the PC market. Blizzard does not have that degree of flexibility. The days of
The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne are long gone. The PC is the only platform you
have invested in, whether that's Windows or Mac, and there is no other place to
go. For better or worse, you've tied yourself to a single platform, and forcing
this scheme onto the community without the benefit of alternate platforms will
not result in millions of fans falling in line like good little sheep to be
fleeced. You may get some, but nowhere near what you were expecting. The rest
will either forsake the game, and Blizzard by extension, or they will turn
pirate.
You may believe that having a persistent online connection serves as an
excellent, nigh on unbeatable, form of DRM. You would be sadly mistaken. Pirates
had Ubisoft's scheme defeated in little more than a month. It was not a perfect
crack, but serviceable enough to play the game. For a game with Diablo III's
profile, the pirate community will go into overdrive, racing each other for
bragging rights as the first to crack the game. If you'll recall, EA claimed
that their DRM on Spore was unbeatable. It went on to be the most pirated game
in history. I can't see how any hacker could resist the challenge of cracking
Diablo III. Jail, fines, prison rape, all of that is meaningless next to a place
in history as the person or persons who cracked open Blizzard's "impervious"
game.
Of course, cracking the game is not the only possible scenario. Another
scenario, and one which is far more likely now that it was a year ago, would be
a coordinated hack on Battle.net instead of directly hacking Diablo III. Given
the discontent that has already been generated by the announcement of the
persistent connection requirement, it would not surprise me in the least that
elements of Anonymous, LulzSec, or other hacker collectives have begun
preliminary planning of such an attack. Such an attack would be considerably
more disruptive than the PSN hack earlier this year. When the PSN was hit, you
could still play disc-based games or titles saved to the hard drive, you just
couldn't patch them. A PSN-style attack on Battle.net would kill access to World
of WarCraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III. While I can well imagine that
Battle.net is a harder target compared to the pre-hack PSN, I cannot believe it
is impervious to attack, and successfully bringing down Battle.net would only
add luster to the reputation of the hackers who could pull it off. Moreover, the
public relations damage involved would ravage your reputation and your
subscription numbers. World of WarCraft has dropped to a little over 11 million
subscribers. In the wake of a PSN-style attack, I would be surprised if even a
tenth that number remained on the rolls.
I can appreciate the need to make money. I can appreciate the need to ensure "a
high quality gaming experience" for players. I can even appreciate the need to
cut down on cheaters, gold farmers, and other denizens who have the potential to
cause personal and commercial grief. But this is not the way to go. If you want
to make an MMO out of the Diablo universe, then set the release date back a
year, retool the game to be an actual honest MMO, and come out into the open
about it being an MMO. Otherwise, attempting to enforce MMO conventions on the
single player experience will lead to the first genuine failure of a Blizzard
title in recent
memory. Consider what happened to your former colleague Bill Roper. He tried to
have it both ways with Hellgate: London and the only noteworthy thing that came
out of that fiasco was the addition of the term "flagshipped" into the community
vernacular. I'm sure there are people like Michael Pachter who will tell you in
breezy terms delivered in stentorian tones that you're going to be helping to
bump that stock price up and making the shareholders happy. But there is more to
business than pumping up the stock price and avoiding making the shareholders
unhappy. There is the recognition that you will not always make a profit this
quarter. There is the understanding that your customers are not simply bags of
money that you can reach into and pull cash out of at will. There is the
calculus which says a buck off the stock price for removing this onerous
requirement of a persistent Internet connection is a bargain compared to the
potential crash of a stock when nobody is buying the game while hackers rape and
pillage across Battle.net like the Golden Horde. This is one time, Mr. Morhaime,
where doing the right thing and the smart thing coincide. Decouple the single
player content from requiring a persistent connection. You may have more
headaches because of it, but your loyal fans will remain loyal.
Regards,
Axel Cushing
The Armchair Empire
(August 12, 2011) |
