Pretending to know what’s best for customers (offline mode)

Uh, this is pretty much the case for a large number of companies in different sectors.  Some companies cater to very specific demographics (luxury car companies and high end retailers for example).  Blizzard caters to a wide range of gamers and are indeed, making pretty decent money off these franchises.

The fact of the matter is that companies that know they have a fairly captive audience/market, are able to take full advantage of that.  That’s business.  In Blizzard’s case, they do know they have an extremely addicted/captive market when it comes to their IP’s.  Look at how many attended Blizzcon for example (20,000 attendees from all over the world at $175 a pop not including transportation and lodging expenses in what is basically a 2-day PR event).

In Diablo III’s case, look at how many players who dislike the direction this game has gone, continue to stick around, posting their dissent of the game on various online communities (some even manage to still pour in hundred/thousands of hours into playing while voicing that displeasure).  They hope that their threats of uninstalling the game and quitting forever will be the catalyst in changing the developers minds about some decisions (seriously, quitting the game one already bought is actually good for Blizzard since it lessens the server load and bandwidth that is used).

So is it really surprising that Marten’s can make such a statement as this, when there were in fact many who were still able to play both online and offline, without the sort of issues that he stated as reasons for why they felt that offline mode was a mistake?  Yes, offline did have problems like hero edited character saves but offline characters were that, offline, and on their own separate open Battle.net realm if played online, seperated from the closed realms.  From a PR perspective though, they don’t want to use “to prevent piracy” as the reason for always online (with software, that’s pretty much a given).

Companies with a captive audience/customer base are able to twist reality for their own purposes in this manner in order to justify their direction, and do what they want to do because they know that those folks will still begrudgingly remain customers.  Call it arrogance if you will, but until another company actually does offer a formidable challenge across all business segments to the bottomline, don’t expect a more humbler approach.

With that said, customers can send a clear signal to publicly traded companies when they aren’t pleased; by actually voting with their wallet.  In Diablo III’s case though, it’s highly unlikely a vocal minority can make an impact against the silent majority who will continue to purchase titles in the franchise.