Diablo 3 Starter Edition is ready for download

[Dr.Disaster]

I found out that Blizzard did add the D3 Starter Edition to my Battle.Net Account game list. Prolly it's in yours too. Time to check and load

[KingOfPain]

Future Shop shipped my Steelbook edition this morning, it is sitting at some post office 300 miles away atm. Just checked again, expected delivery date is Tuesday

[Sirian]

Future Shop shipped my Steelbook edition this morning, it is sitting at some post office 300 miles away atm. Just checked again, expected delivery date is Tuesday

I haven't bought a non-digital copy of any game in three years.

And I am slow to embrace technology. (Got a cell phone at about that time, too!)

Digital is easier, safer, faster, often cheaper (not even counting shipping or self-transport costs) and you never have to search for the disks, reserve copies in advance, stand in line, etc. Make the switch.


- Sirian

[Tyrmith]

Digital is easier, safer, faster, often cheaper (not even counting shipping or self-transport costs) and you never have to search for the disks, reserve copies in advance, stand in line, etc. Make the switch.

The only thing that worries me about digital is that you have to buy it from companies you trust. You buy it from some random no-name website, they could go out of business and especially if they use DRM, you're in trouble as you won't be able to use it anymore.

[Oddtwang]

I bought a physical copy because me preorder was 40% cheaper than Blizz wanted for the game on release. Am normally with Sirian on this one though AFAIK it's now attached to my b.net account so it may not matter if I did manage to misplace the disk.

[Gustaran]

The only thing that worries me about digital is that you have to buy it from companies you trust. You buy it from some random no-name website, they could go out of business and especially if they use DRM, you're in trouble as you won't be able to use it anymore.

Even big companies like EA are well known to switch of multiplayer servers for games that are only 2-3 years old, sometimes killing off the option to play the multiplayer mode, because they want you to buy the latest version of FIFA or NFS...

[The Black Cursor]

Only online and always-on DRM is a bad model for many reasons. See here,

http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=4371

for a good discussion on this. I'm not playing D3 right now just for this reason--preferring to play great Indie games such as "Legend of Grimrock" and "Dungeons of Dredmor". I did pre-order GW2 though, but that's a game model (MMO) that only works online by definition.

Be seeing you...

---> TBC (Trust your Best Customers, the PAYING kind)

[Sirian]

Even big companies like EA are well known to switch of multiplayer servers for games that are only 2-3 years old, sometimes killing off the option to play the multiplayer mode, because they want you to buy the latest version of FIFA or NFS...

EA "won" an "award" recently as the company with THE worst customer service and satisfaction record. They don't even care.

It's not a model I would choose to use, but they can get away with it up to a point, because enough customers don't care either.

But I care, and my wife cares. If an EA product looks so appealing, we may still buy it. (My wife loves Sims, for example). But Sims is kind of a special case, as it has a strong modding community that cares enough to fix what the dev team drops the ball on -- and that's always plenty of stuff. On the other hand, if the product is from EA and we aren't heavily anticipating it? No second thought. We will avoid it.


Holding EA up as an example of what "the industry on the whole" is doing is grossly unfair to the rest of the industry.

As for digital sellers being here-today-gone-tomorrow, I have bought a bunch of games digitally. I am having trouble remembering any I didn't get through Steam, Blizzard or Stardock. Might not be any, for games. For utilities and things, though, I've bought digital and not yet had any blank out on me.

What kind of shelf life are we wanting from a game, anyway? I got a good five years (on and off) out of Descent 2. There are a handful of diehards STILL TODAY playing in the first online Descent 2 multiplayer league (which I founded, but only stuck with for five months). That's 16 years and counting, but they have to jump through quite some hoops to get a game designed for MSDOS on a 486 to run reasonably on Win 7.

How many games have I ever played significantly for more than three years? ... Master of Orion (9). Diablo (9). Railroad Tycoon (7). Descent (6). Descent 2 (5). World of Warcraft (4.5). None of the Civ games make that list, nor any Ultima games. It's a pretty short list.

Does digital have drawbacks? A couple. Is there risk? Not much. I'd be a lot more worried about buying a product, not liking it, and not getting my money's worth than I would about loving it so much I lose access to it years down the road.

And some companies are better than others. You can still play Diablo on battle net. Blizzard isn't perfect, but I have to give them high marks on doing good business in general. They do care, within reason. Not like EA.


- Sirian

[Kiyalynn]

EA "won" an "award" recently as the company with THE worst customer service and satisfaction record. They don't even care.

It's not a model I would choose to use, but they can get away with it up to a point, because enough customers don't care either.

But I care, and my wife cares. If an EA product looks so appealing, we may still buy it. (My wife loves Sims, for example).

Then again, I won't even buy the Sims from EA unless its on sale. They don't deserve my money, but no other company makes that type of game . I also specifically chose not to buy Spore unless it was though steam to avoid EA's 3 install-per-CD anti-piracy scheme... In fact I'm glad I bought Sims though steam too.. Steam puts a week delay on EA's game updates that makes it so when I get the update it doesn't completely crash my game, like it does for everyone else.

You know... I think I'll never buy a EA game from the shelf again... always though steam and on sale.

~ Kiyalynn
~~ Sirian's Wife

[Injera]

I think in this case the online-only aspect is less about DRM and more about getting people engaged in the RMAH and the battle.net social network. Lots of the "interesting decisions" they've made point to those two things being front and center here.

Blizzard is evil, but their games are so smooth...