Twitter remains abuzz at the news, with fans variously describing Blizzard's surprise move as "totally insane," "just...wrong," and, worst of all, "EPIC FAIL." An online petition has amassed over 25,000 signatures so far.
Although Blizzard's keen to emphasize the features of their online service -- which will track player stats and provide rich community functions -- it's seen as a preemptive strike against potential Starcraft II pirates, as those with illegal copies of the game would be banned from connecting to Blizzard's servers. A somewhat similar move by EA last year resulted in its massive hit Spore racking up thousands of one-star reviews on Amazon, and being slapped with a class-action lawsuit.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
Everyone is always outraged about one thing or an other. Just STFU and play the damn game. It's going to be great with or with out it...
Their justifications for dropping LAN support do not hold water.
It will do nothing to stop piracy on top of their authenticated server system. It will just pointlessly up network latencies for people playing across a LAN, as data will have to needlessly traverse the net.
I'm sure their will be a workaround but this is definitely a big blow. I played Starcraft about a million times and all of them were LAN.
Blizzard has found a way to circumvent piracy: World of Warcraft is subscription-based and all the upcoming games (Starcraft 2, Diablo 3) will be tied to a non-transferrable Battle.net account.
Sure, the games will be pirated somehow but not as easily and probably without multiplayer support.
It's going to work and no petition will cause ActiBlizz to change their minds.
I will wager that 2/3 of the "outraged" people are actually going.
'You mean we're actually going to have to BUY it if we want to do something besides play the single player campaign'?