New unverified rumor going around – pay to play Bnet 2.0

Posted by Lipton on August 31st, 2009 filed in StarCraft News

A new Starcraft 2 rumor just popped up on my radar and I feel the need to comment on this. Starcraft2.pro has reported (from a "trusted" source) that the new Battle.net 2.0 will be pay to play(use).

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Hey starcraft fans,
We hate it to be the “bad news deliverer” but someone have to say it. We just received disappointing news from an trusted source after some researches after the BlizzCon 09 and the sad truth is:

As we all know ,Blizzard came up with the idea to make this “great” social network (first guessed are twitter or facebook) and one of the problems is money.This service definitely requires some big buck to be invested and to “solve” this problem Blizzard came up with the brilliant idea – to make monthly “fees” like in World of Warcraft. So you just have to pay a few dollars to get access to Battle.net 2.0. By the way: they’re also planning the same for Diablo 3 but we already knew this months ago as Blizzard said this on the conference in 2008. That’s not a big surprise because people knew it already in 2008 but always thought that it’ll be avoided by other incomes. That’s why Blizzard didn’t announced it on BlizzCon.

Diablo III’s director Jay Wilson recently told an audience at BlizzCon that Blizzard and Activision are looking to make some money with the Battle.Net service.
Jay Wilson:
We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features. We kind of have to.

The other argument is that Blizzard can 100% avoid piracy with this monthly costs.

There aren’t any further information about the costs yet but it is supposed to be between 5 and 8 $. Less than World of Warcraft. This was also an answer to the 130.000 petition signatures. We will keep you posted.
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Update: Rumor = total BS

Blizzard has said Bnet 2.0 will NOT cost you a monthly fee.

About the Jay Wilson quote:

Jay Wilson:
We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features. We kind of have to.

Blizzard signed a deal with Massively, a huge in game ad marketing/distribution company run by Microsoft last Dec. Banner ads similar to those in the original Battle.net could be what Jay Wilson was talking about when he used the word monetize. Which is also the term used when you use space on your website to sell ads.

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rumor source: Starcraft2.pro