Startcraft II sells 1.5 Mil in 48 hours... huh | Hacker News Reader

Startcraft II sells 1.5 Mil in 48 hours... huh

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15 pointsbhavin19 comments

It really bums me out when companies that have terrible, user-hostile policies get rewarded with record-smashing sales. You know their CEOs see the sales report and are all too happy to attribute it to their own doing. See Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for another example.

This might be obvious to most people here, but what do you consider to be their user-hostile policies with starcraft 2?

Probably the most controversial misfeature is that Starcraft 2 doesn't provide LAN support, ostensibly to combat piracy. If you want officially-supported multi-player, it's Blizzard's Battle.net service or gtfo.

Internet access is so universal now that this doesn't seem like much of an imposition to me. What are the other complaints?

Starcraft is a national sport in some countries. Not having LAN support is pretty significant because you can't get low latency like that any other way.

Really? I don't buy it. The game hosting is still peer to peer, the packets shouldn't have any need to leave the local network once the game is started.

I'd have to see actual tests of people on the same local network with high latency before I'd believe it's a problem.

You're right on the money, the game takes place on the local network- the only reason the internet is required is so you can log in to bnet.

Trying custom games against the AI, I'm seeing occasional network blips.

I am betting a heartbeat or something to blizzard is happening at least.

Region locked - You have to have the US version of the game to play against US players and no playing against South Korea.

Removed 'spawn' install - locked down installation so you can play 1 copy on several computers - but only with each other.

The single player campaigns are going to be broken up into 3 $60 games.

There's the Real-id fiasco that they've backed off a little bit on.

User made maps aren't files that can be passed around, they MUST be hosted on bnet's servers, and there's a 25MB limit per-account.

However you fall on the question, the real problem is we end up not talking about the various merits of the game and how much we can't wait to play it, but instead dissect the policies surrounding the game.

Also, what happens when battle.net is down?

Uhm, you cant multiplay on them perhaps, but you can use them locally fine..

1.5 million is still pretty low for a game of this caliber and fan base. I know this is hearsay but I can't help but think that the previously stated points on their new user-hostile policies hurt sales fairly badly this round.

It's huge for a contemporary PC release. 150k copies would be great performance for a typical PC game in its first week on the market. Most AAA PC titles will never break a million copies.

The inability to play the game in English in a Latin American server is a deal breaker to me.

what I want to know is how come they didn't milk it by releasing a slight upgrade every few years like they did with warcraft?

I'm going to guess you're not being sarcastic and give a straight answer.

They are going to do that. This only has the Terran campaign.

well, yes... but my question was why didn't they do that for the last 10 (has it been 10 years?) since starcraft was released?

um, they did release an expansion...

1, They did release an expansion

2, They released another RTS, Warcraft III and an expansion, then an MMO.

The whole "episodic content" and/or DLC model wasn't very prevalent in 1999.

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