With World of Warcraft being such a successful title and opening so many more doors for Blizzard with the major increase in revenue, a lot of gamers have been concerned whether Battle.net would become a subscription-based service or not. At last year's Blizzcon Rob Pardo touched on this by stating that "We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra". But that wasn't much help considering World of Warcraft is subscription based. Now he has confirmed that a player who buys Starcraft 2 retail will not be paying any subscription fees for Bnet 2.0.
Mike Morhaime(1)
what I will say is that a player who goes to retail and buys the Starcraft 2 box at retail will have the full Starcraft 2 game included in the box and they will have the ability to play on battlenet with no additional fee.Rob Pardo(2)
I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.
So where will it happen? Where will Blizzard monetize BNet to continue the revenue stream created by WoW? My best guess is eSports. With the new observation features included in replays and Blizzard openly stating from the beginning that they are placing a huge emphasis on eSports I think it's very clear.
I don't think it would be out of line to say Blizzard will be revealing some BNet features at this year's Blizzcon. After all, the new Battle.net will effect both Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2.
Thanks SCWire
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