4 ms·
There’s a story behind the no lan play + mandatory account thing. As the article says, StarCraft was huge in South Korea. The lesser known part is that most pe
by chongli 2y ago
There’s a story behind the no lan play + mandatory account thing. As the article says, StarCraft was huge in South Korea.
The lesser known part is that most people there did not play the game on their home PCs, they played it at PC cafes (PC bangs). These establishments engaged in large scale piracy of the game, installing it on hundreds of PCs without a license. They used the LAN play feature to bypass Blizzard entirely. So the lack of LAN play and the account requirement are a direct response to mass piracy of their game in Korea.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoOne may wonder if you should respond at all, given how well it played out for StarCraft in Korea. Sometimes what you see as an impediment is in fact the essential part of the success.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kevingadd 2y agoThe game being a big hit in SK is nice theoretically but doesn't mean you can afford to develop patches or sequels if nobody is actually buying copies of it.
- kzrdude 2y agoSC was successful in large part thanks to the community, so maybe to replicate the success, game developers need to figure out how to recreate the same thing and coexist with a robust community. I think monthly subscriptions are an absolute blocker for some great community contributions, for example.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoWhat are you talking about? At least 4.5 million copies were sold in SK. The question is, did lan clubs reduce or increase the sales? It's hard to know for sure, since no AB-test was made but I strongly suspect that they did increase the sales by a huge amount even if the clubs themselves didn't buy a single copy. Give 'em the razor, sell 'em the blades.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoStarcraft shipped with a "spawn installation" feature that let you do this specifically to support LAN play If you didn't intend to play on Battle.Net or play the single player campaigns, you never needed more than the Spawn installation I would seriously question if these were actually pirates copies at all ...
- chongli 2y agoThe spawn installation feature only supported 8 copies of the game per CD and was only intended for personal use among friends and family. Those PC cafes in Korea were renting out the game 24/7 as a commercial operation.