Blizzard’s Next-Gen MMO Is A Major Investment
You may not have heard about it, but Blizzard is also working on a big new online franchise besides the next Starcraft 2 episodes and Diablo 3. Emphasize on big, because that's the key word Activision is trying to utter. Bobby Kotick called this project "an enormous investment", putting it side by side with their other big investment at Bungie. Yes it's Kotick, yes he's a money grabbing whore but still, we're talking Blizzard over here so there must be some truth to his words.
Starcraft II – It Will Make You A Man
I love RTS games. I love the strategic aspect, the management, the mini wars and all that stuff. Strangely enough, I'm not by any means an RTS guru. I think the only ones I've played extensively are Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and Pikmin. Yeah, that's right, Pikmin. I'm a man just for admitting that.
But here we are in August of 2010 and we are just about a week after the release of StarCraft II, the sequel to one of, if not THE most popular RTS games. It may as well be titled StarCraft to me, because I barely played the original. I was lucky enough to have a friend that donated their 7 hour trial that came with his copy of StarCraft II. I've got about an hour left and, honestly, I need to pick up this game this weekend. After playing the shit and piss out of some campaign and multiplayer, I learned a very important lesson about myself that many other newcomers probably learned at the exact same time. This lesson being "Holy shit, I'm not Korean". I also learned this game takes some serious practice.
StarCraft 2 might melt your PC… but not anymore!
If your computer is still in one piece and not on fire, you are in the group with the lucky ones who didn't suffer from the Blizzard's negligence to optimize the 3D menus. Apparently, the framerates in the menu are not limited by default, and they can cause heavy load on the system, with all the 3D blitz and eye candy that the menu has.
Fear no more though, you can manually fix this issue by accessing the text file at "Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt" and add the following lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
In other news, the 1.0.1 patch has just been released, and it includes the following changes:
* Campaign saves have been optimized.
* Fixed an issue with sound not playing on some 7.1 systems.
Thanks ActionTrip for the tip.
Starcraft 2 – 2 Million Copies Without Korea
Here we go, some preliminary sales results are here. Remember how we predicted 5 million copies on launch day? Well it got two already, and that's excluding Korea because there's no data yet. An estimation says there have been 3-4 million copies sold in South Korea, and that would make us right.
We'll come back with the full official results later, stay tuned.
Starcraft 2 – 5 million copies on launch day? Totally!
GTA IV sold 3.8 million copies on launch day and it established itself as the best selling video game in history. But then in November 2009 came Modern Warfare 2 and mopped the floor with it, selling an outrageous 4.7 million copies on launch day in USA and UK alone. That's $310 million dollars in just 24 hours. Hard to beat, don't you think?
But, if there's anyone out there who can surpass this achievements, it's gotta be Blizzard. I'm not trying to flame on Infinity Ward's game, even though it was a silly remake with almost zero improvements, I'm just aware of the facts:
- Starcraft 2 already has over one million beta players. Not everyone got a key, so it would have had a lot more if it was an open for all beta.
- We only waited Modern Warfare 2 for 2 years. Starcraft 2 comes after 12 years of waiting, so the hype surrounding it has reached critical levels
- The first Starcraft is still being played around the world and it even got to be South Korea's national sport. It sold 11 million copies world wide since 1998 and the players are eager to get their hands on a shiny new sequel. Actually, there already were Starcraft 2 competitions in the beta version!
- On the 17th of July there was a total of 700,000 preorders in North America alone and over 2 million world wide
All these ingredients indicate that we're in the the biggest launch in history. The target is 4.8 million copies, but I say it's going to be least 5 million. Only one more day of waiting and we'll know the answer.
Who Does It Best – Hype
Buying Halo 3 on line
The second feature of the "Who Does It Best" specials is back by popular demand, thanks to the positive feedback on the first one.
Hype is a major element in every developer's strategy, because even though you know your game is bad, you can still manage to sell millions of copies if you take care of your marketing department. At least on launch day anyway. Of course, hype is not a bad thing itself. Without it, there would be many unknown good games out there. So let's see who does it best now, shall we?
No Early Reviews For Starcraft 2. Also, It Didn't Cost $100 million
Not that expensive after all
Gaming journalists world wide won't be getting any advanced review copies, no matter whom they're working for. Blizzard didn't exactly give an explanation for this, but they did say something about the new Battle.net being too complex and deeply integrated into the game that it makes it practically impossible for journalists to use their servers and properly test the game. But hey, that's not too bad: those who really wait for the game are already familiar with it because of the beta, so it's not a big deal that we won't see a review prior to the game's release.
Now for the other piece of the news: apparently, the news according to which Blizzard spent over $100 million on Starcraft 2 in the 7 years of development are false. They never actually revealed the development costs for Starcraft 2, and the information from The Wall Street Journal was allegedly wrong. Those $100 mil were actually the World of Warcraft total costs, including the 2 expansions to date.
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