Botched Diablo III launch "hurts" PC gaming, says developer

Well they are going to jump right back... Blizzard is a good company and I would guess that people will forget about the night of mayhem...

I believe this is Activision doing not Blizzard, the thing Blizzard lately hasn't been consumer friendly, I can see how this affect the futures sales of their games. If the this DRM eventually becomes the common practice for developers, then god help us.

Gamers get mad but would they really just give up on the game because of a failed launch? I doubt it. Game is amazing once everything works. This doesn't hurt PC gaming at all. There are many other PC games out there... and coming.

I think this may leave a bad taste in pc gamers mouths, but i doubt it will do any long term damage.

...I can barely play the game because it is online only...I get so many lag spikes that it takes 5 minutes for me to talk to an npc when it should be instant...

meh it happens get over it. i dont really care as long as i get to play

You could've guessed this would happen with the overload of the servers and the inability to play Diablo at first. It is/was the most anticipated game coming out. People will get over it as long as the trend for PC gaming isn't persistent internet connection with every launch being screwed up.

its awesome game

i wouldnt say it hurt the platform as a whole but it's reputation for reliability

I have no doubt Blizzard will be OK after this. But hasn't anyone heard of over preparing?

When WoW launched that was pretty bad as well and this was before Blizzard was part of Activision. I didn't see anyone fleeing from the PC platform. If anything, WoW brought more people into the PC platform. D3 having a minor snag for 1 day isn't going to hurt PC sales. There are so many games offered on PC which are harder to port over to consoles and iOS, why would people stop playing these types of games just because of D3. People should know by now what to expect from Activision Blizzard, first few days of connectivity are going to be brutal. The same thing will happen when Titan gets release by them, people will get angry faced for a month and then for the next X amount of years swoon about the game.

It may hurt gamers in the short term, but they will be back. There won't be that much damage done in the long run.

I think it mainly hurts the market of console gamers who had considered moving to pc gaming hearing about problems like this is just not gonna bring many converts.

TheBizzle1 said: I think it mainly hurts the market of console gamers who had considered moving to pc gaming hearing about problems like this is just not gonna bring many converts.

I still think the console gamers would still move to PC games. It's not like console games have perfect launches either.

My take on this whole situation is the fact that Blizzard is still ignorant to their own community... EVERY single time Blizzard releases a game the servers have trouble at launch... its been over 10 years now Blizzard... when are you gonna spend the billions we gave you on making sure a new game rolls out flawlessly ?

I didnt spend $100 bucks to come home to a downed server once the installation finally completed...

I was disappointed i could not play the other night. However i also realized that it was going to happen when i went to get the game so it did not bother me to badly. I do not hold it against them.

People need to realize that these things happen and they're not intentional. Blizzard/Activision (North America) obviously didn't plan ahead as well as they should have, which is odd considering they've been running large volume games for years. Alas, a lesson was learned and hopefully they take it into account in their future releases. Also: OnyxAnomaly#1269.

TheBizzle1 said: I think it mainly hurts the market of console gamers who had considered moving to pc gaming hearing about problems like this is just not gonna bring many converts.

Console gamers are used to publishers dropping the ball. CoD is broken for at least a month after release whether is it from gamebreaking glitches being exploited to something as simple as server stability (which shouldn't happen any more since they put out the same game every year with just new paint). Battlefield 3 servers were unplayable for the first week and a half and to this day you can't reliably get your full squad in a game on the same team a majority of the time. Homefront was just a disaster, worse servers than BF3, at least with BF3 you were able to get into some games. ME2 and DA:O not being able to get all your free pre-order stuff or your stuff from the collector's edition for the first week because of server problems.

@Onyx: No they didn't intentionally mean for this to happen but they could have performed with some type of due diligence and over compensated the server capacity. It's not like they are hurting for money. 900m-1b each year in profits with not that many games being developed can buy you a few more servers which wouldn't even cost a tenth of that. It's not like they don't have the revenue to do research on this stuff, anyone with Google can predict that this game would require large server capacities.

I can of have to agree with this. Mainly becuase PC beta's make the full release even worse. Look at the Diablo 3 beta. 1 chapter that could be finished in 10 minutes. And becuase they didn't open it they got this. The point of Beta's on PC other then polishing a game is to break servers in. And how Blizzard did this was just sad and badly planned. They knew the audiance coming and yet still not prepared.

Personally, I think this is like the whole Bioware EA thing. Bioware teamed up with EA, and all of their titles after that dropped severely in quality. In my opinion, if you team up with a big publisher, this thing is bound to happen.

The fact that servers cramped up early on the launch wouldn't drastically hurt PC gaming in general, only short-term as most already mentioned, because online play has always been a major aspect in contrast to consoles.
Diablo 3 is definitely becoming a success.

Ok, so the thing is, no one ever said that Blizzard is going to end up hurting because of the crash. Because of the crash, it reinforces the thought that online PC games are not very reliable. So even if it is only a slight shift, it makes the person who owns both a PC and an Xbox, more likely to buy the Xbox version of a game (assuming the starting reliability of the PC and the Xbox are equal before the crash), leading to less sales for those depending on the PC industry.

I think this only really hurts people who agree with the always required internet connection to play games, which was silly for a single player game.

i do believe the DRM and how u cant play offline is major bs

ios ...lol