May Contain Nuts

I think I’m beginning to understand how and why Blizzard continually manages to make more money than some third-world countries… they make one game and sell it to you three times.  Clearly taking the Square-Enix Final Fantasy approach to storytelling through games (whereby you answer an increasingly large number of questions about the primary story’s plot through additional titles, ideally on completely different consoles so that hardware manufacturers can get in on the consumer screw-fest), they’re releasing StarCraft 2 as 3 separate titles, each focusing on a different race.  I suspect that to get the whole story, you’re going to have to drop $150 on what should by rights probably be a $60-$70 experience.  And before I go any farther, I would just like to point out that this is a different sort of “sell one game three times” magic than what the likes of Tell Tale Games does with their products… you really only have to buy a season once to get the whole story, and a whole season is still cheaper than most stand-alone titles.  Blizzard, on the other hand, will probably charge full price for each installment of their epic title of ultimate destiny (dun da-da-dun!).

While I respect Blizzard on one level for being able to turn such massive profits off of the backs of crushed souls the world over World of Warcraft players and bucking the trend toward games being varying shades of brown and black, stuff like this (as well as the completely unnecessary and inexplicably popular portable soul-crushing experience World of Warcraft: The Gathering CCG) just strikes me as exploiting a fanbase already slavishly devoted to your every whim.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Computing, Games, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.