Maybe D3 will open some new startup opportunities? Yes.. yes that's what I'll tell myself. It's all research.
I personally wanted to make a game guide for Infinity Blade 2 but epic legal threatened me out of it (and we had a friendly pre-existing relationship, which counted for exactly nothing. they'd interviewed me for their website and sent me free stuff, and i had a free guide on their forum with 200k views that they had made sticky). Dealing with their legal crap wasn't worth the hassle. I was even willing to give them undeserved money to be left alone, but they wanted a large cash payment upfront and were unwilling to discuss any other payment approach.
Anyway the point is game guides should be a pretty good small business opportunity -- there is a very real market for help playing games better and being more successful in them -- but there are (baseless but real) legal problems so be wary.
You might expect game companies to be thrilled to have services sold around their games, which their customers find provides game-related value to them. Just like Apple is happy to see other people selling iPhone cases. But a lot of game companies are not happy and will harass you.
It seems to me that usually these game companies have a publishing (as in, books) branch that manages the official guides. THEY'RE the ones who can't accept any competition, possibly due to their contracts with Prima/Brady (or whoever).
Even so, I suppose you'd have to defend the fair-use in court.
If they've published their own game guide, just don't take any material from it and you won't be violating any copyrights on that either.
For trademark, the point is to prevent consumers from being confused about who is responsible for products, so people can build up a brand name and have a reputation they are responsible for and have control over. Guide titles like, "Ubergeek's Ultimate Unofficial Guide to Diablo 3" do not violate trademark because they do not cause any confusion about whose product this is. It's well established that you can use someone else's trademark as a substring in your product title when it's important to explaining what your product is and won't cause consumer confusion. (Similarly, "Pegasus Case for iPhone" or "Ubergeek's iPod Battery Replacement Kit" would not violate trademark.)
But, yes, as you say: being completely right doesn't prevent you having to defend yourself and spending time and money on that. (Could you recoup lawyers fees after you win? I have no idea about that.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. (But I have read some legal sources about this.)
I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games like WoW and the new Star Wars MMO will be child's play.
In 10 years I expect the phenomenon of losing your job or your relationship over game addiction will be much wider spread and we may see an effort by the govt to put caps on experiences in 15 years.
Once you can capture most all the methods of input from a player and produce multiple levels of output all for the purpose of engaging the player longer and longer, there has to be a governor at some point... until 25+ years from now where the tech is so advanced that some people's jobs are just to exist in these virtual worlds (i.e. marketers for Apple sitting at social hubs inside of Galaxy of Warcraft 50.0 talking people into checking out the new iPad inside the game where they can click a button to pre-order it in real life after playing with a 3D model of it in virtual-life).
sigh I don't stand a chance...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio
PS: Also, women tend to have more marriages per lifetime than men which shifts things a fair amount.
Luckily, I've sworn off Blizzard since they sued the bnetd guys, so D3 isn't a concern for me.
It's a Rogue-like game. The learning curve is rather steep, but worth it imho.
This freaked me out for a second.
You are here to have an experience, logging on and having that experience elsewhere is fine if it isn't destroying lives around you.
Then you think 40 or 50 years out with undetectable differences between virtual reality and real-reality and you wonder if at some point we did get lost in a virtual world we created for ourselves a la Matrix... how would we know?
You could also imagine a world within a world once the virtual world is so real it isn't as fun.
Endless recursion :)
Well, we did other things. Like rollerblade, take some trips and plan a wedding. But . . .
May 16 I will be sick. I'll pre-schedule the carpal tunnel surgery for mid June . . . :/
I suspect that you'll have Blizzard not only taxing transactions, but being the counter-party in many of them anyway. If they can control the drop rate for farmers (and hence the perceived value), yet can materialize items at will what's to stop them from turning it into an infinite money machine?