I almost hate to ask… but any word on a subscription fee? I mean, sure SCII and DIII will be free to play multiplayer… via BNETII… which will cost… $5 a month? Tell me we’ve been assured that’s not the case… /cry

Yeah, there has been "word" on it, but nothing *confirmed*. The part on payment system for the game and Battle.net will be handled in part three of the article.

Lots of bad stuff in here.  "Achievements" are doing a good job of hurting gaming everywhere, from Guild Wars, to Team Fortress 2, to Soul Calibur 4 and Castle Crashers and beyond.

ALSO, what’s up with the lack of any networking beyond Battle.net?  LAN gaming is far superior!  And also, it’s quite a shame to see them take a page out of Valve’s book from Steam: banning people from being able to play games, even universally OTHER, unrelated games—games they PAID FOR.

I’ll stop coming to this site forever if Diablo 3 has a fee. That’s how sure I am that there won’t be.

Their answers of "Well we don’t have a model assigned to the game yet" is what EVERY developer says about EVERY game, regardless of genre when asked about pricing. Before we "knew" officially that WoW was going to cost $15 a month, they said the model hadn’t been locked down. But we knew it was going to cost $15 a month because every other MMORPG does.

This is a Diablo game; to charge monthly would drive off Diablo fans and make no sense whatsoever for the game’s genre. Non-MMORPG games having a monthly fee is unheard of in the realm of developers who actually give a damn.

CaptainDingo is not wrong. ^^

I agree: CaptainDingo is not wrong.

I know I’m just one schlub, and Blizz will do fine without my cash.
But for what’s it’s worth (less than 2 cents, likely), a monthly battle.net fee will permanently turn me off to D3.
I never played WoW past the free demo for this reason alone.
I would pay a high price for the game purchase itself ($100+), but I will not pay monthly fees.

I played Diablo and D2/D2X from the beginning (and have given many thousands of pageviews & unique visitors to diabloii.net/diii.net), and I still play D2 online periodically. So, I can’t tell you what a bummer it will be if Blizz charges monthly fees.

[QUOTE=joconne6;6769803]I agree: CaptainDingo is not wrong.

I know I’m just one schlub, and Blizz will do fine without my cash.
But for what’s it’s worth (less than 2 cents, likely), a monthly battle.net fee will permanently turn me off to D3.
I never played WoW past the free demo for this reason alone.
I would pay a high price for the game purchase itself ($100+), but I will not pay monthly fees.

I played Diablo and D2/D2X from the beginning (and have given many thousands of pageviews & unique visitors to diabloii.net/diii.net), and I still play D2 online periodically. So, I can’t tell you what a bummer it will be if Blizz charges monthly fees.

Yeah, this is another thing. You are not alone. Thousands of people feel exactly like you, and Blizzard would most likely not risk alienating those players from buying the game to get monthly fees. By the way, even Bobby Kotick talked about the possibilities with ads in game. What he meant (according to everyone I’ve ever asked at Blizzard) was the little ad in Battle.net game windows, and from the revenues that millions of millions of pageviews will show there, they can probably make a good buck out of Battle.net from just that…