Starcraft 2’s trilogy release makes good business sense
Much has been made about Blizzard’s recent announcement that StarCraft 2 will be released as a trilogy. For those who don’t know, the basic story is that the initial release of the game will include the multi-player portion of the game, and the campaign for the Terran side, one of three sides (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) featured in the game.
This has generated a lot of controversy online, with people unhappy about having to pay for three games. While I understand where they are coming from, I also think this move on Blizzard’s part can make a good deal of sense from both a business and a gaming point of view. I’m going to try to explain this below as best I can.
To start off, we need to consider Blizzard as a company. Here’s how I see Blizzard: as a high-quality creator of commercial games. You can’t argue that World of Warcraft is a polished product (I’m sure there are rough edges, don’t get me wrong. But the average person doesn’t see those the first time through.), you can’t argue that StarCraft, Warcraft III, or Diablo II weren’t polished products. Blizzard is the James Patterson or Robert Ludlum of the gaming industry: they are dedicated to the craft of creating tight, vivid, readable (playable, in Blizzard’s case) titles. You can never tell me that Patterson has a dedication to literary craft. You can never tell me that Blizzard has a dedication to a deep or, well, complicated gaming experience. Blizzard makes games to get the widest following possible so they can make the most money possible. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just the kind of games they choose to make.
As for my favorite game companies over the years, Cavedog, Black Isle, Warren Spector’s ION Storm Austin, Irrational Games, and Stardock, I see them as creators of interesting games. Total Annihilation wasn’t and isn’t the most polished game in existence (although it tightened up considerably from the original 1.0 to 3.1). Neither is Deus Ex, Freedom Force, Galactic Civilizations II, or five or ten of my other favorites that I could name. But here’s the key with all these games: Depth. Total Annihilation is, to me, almost infinitely replayable to me even in unmodded form, because of how many different ways there are to play it. Deus Ex is mind-blowingly deep for its era when you consider how many different ways you can play it. Same for Fallout and Freedom Force. These are not games that will truly appeal to a wide cross section of the gaming and non-gaming populace.
Okay, so how does this relate to the Blizzard announcement?
First, Blizzard knows the amount that they are going to spend on the campaigns, with cinematics, writing, etc. I’ve tried making missions for various RTS games (Total Annihilation and Ground Control, specifically). It’s hard, it’s complicated, and it takes a long time to do them right. Blizzard’s team has some of the most talented mission designers in the industry, and they do mission design very well. Just compare TA’s campaigns to Starcraft’s. As much as I enjoy TA, the Starcraft campaign is an all-around better written and better designed experience. Blizzard knows this aspect of their company is a strength.
Blizzard also probably ran the math, and figured that they need to sell X copies at roughly US$50 to make a profit. X is probably a pretty big number, I’d estimate somewhere on the order of 2.5 million units (yes, I’m saying that to make a profit on Starcraft II, Blizzard needs to gross around $125 million US. Yeah, I know that’s huge. I don’t have raw numbers to back this, just a gut estimate). That’s a lot. Even with the South Korea factor, that’s a lot.
So, if you’re Blizzard, what do you do? You’re probably looking at your campaign, which is perhaps your biggest expense from now to finishing, with cinematics, playtesting, design, etc, all draining your budget. You also know that this campaign design is one of your team’s strengths. Your team needs cash (say what you want about the ridiculous amount of money they get from WoW, a company like Blizzard which survives on highly polished products knows they can’t milk WoW forever.), maybe not now but in 15 months. If you go with a release date in 12 months, you have to cut the length of your campaign by 1/3rd (if there are 30+ missions for each side, assume you’re going to axe 10 of them), rush it through, and maybe hope to put stuff back in during an expansion pack… not the best options for a company that survives on highly polished products.
Secondly, most PC gamers are more interested in the single player experience than the multiplayer experience. Blizzard knows this. Starcraft and Counter-Strike are the only non-MMORPG games I can think of off the top of my head which have retained large player bases this deep into their life cycle. Warcraft III multiplayer doesn’t have the player base that Starcraft still does. Heck, I’ll bet that Starcraft has a larger current player base than Command & Conquer 3, Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War, or Company of Heroes. Blizzard has to know that it can’t rely on a huge, rabid multiplayer base to sustain the game long term. The StarCraft Battle Chest is still a decent seller. There’s absolutely no guarantee that Starcraft 2 will be able to duplicate that.
Ok, so, if you’re Blizzard, what do you do? First, you take a look at sales numbers for the HL2 Episodes. There’s a precedent there. You do the math and begin to figure that your initial release, SC2:Terran, sells for $50 USD. Let’s say you move 2 million copies of that. You make $100 million. 9 months later, SC2:Protoss releases. You sell it for $30, because let’s be honest, even though you’re including the multiplayer component in here, it’s a sunk cost at this point. Every dollar you make on multiplayer at this point is as close to pure profit as you can get. You did such a good job on the SC2:Terran campaign that most everyone wants to play Protoss, and you move 1.75 million copies. You just made another $60 million. 9 months after that, SC2:Zerg comes out again at a $30 price point, and you sell another 1.5 million copies. You make $45 million. At this point, you can come out with a Gold Edition 6 months later for minimal cost to you, have it cost $50, sell 250,000 copies, and make another $12 million or so. You’ve now made (gross) over to $200 million, which is far more than what you would have made if you would have cut the campaigns down and released a single product.
From a business point of view, when your other option is to sell SC2 with all the campaigns cut down, and then maybe do a single expansion pack later if sales justify, the way they’ve chosen makes the better business sense. If they had announced that SC2 sales were going to be structured that way from the start, they’d have no backlash like there seems to be now. From the point of view of a company that makes highly polished games, and depends on the polish to move units, this move makes good business sense. I’d almost guarantee they’re going to see the same initial sales numbers on SC2:Terran as they would have seen on SC2, and if they can deliver their usual highly polished product, this will end up grossing them a higher figure than their other option.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Too many words and numbers for my short attention span.
It’s a dumb move. People will download the fuck out of the second and third games.
How are newbies supposed to learn the tech trees of the various factions without a campaign to slowly guide them through the units and the varied play styles? Have you forgotten that SupCom is extremely flawed in how its factions are nearly identical in how they’re played? Sure, there are nuances, but SC’s factions are nothing alike.
It’s a bad business and longevity move. Online play is its own worst enemy — getting repeatedly raped by better players is not fun. If there’s nothing to teach you, you won’t learn a thing getting stomped on.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
T2A`, you’re probably right about that being a weakness. My guess is that there will be a lot of terran players as newbies in the early days.
But I think you’re overestimating the importance of multiplayer as a unit-mover. There will be lots of people that pirate the second and third parts of the trilogy, but it is entirely possible they would have pirated the game anyway. The still-sizable majority of gamers are interested in that single player experience, and those are the folks that Blizzard is targeting with this move, NOT the multiplayer fanatics. From what I’ve read, the second and third parts won’t include anything new multi-wise (although I would imagine they would be the then current patch level), meaning that a dedicated multi player won’t have a reason to buy them to continue their multiplayer experience.
I could be wrong, there could be a huge backlash. But look at Spore and the ‘anti-DRM’ backlash around that. Didn’t really affect sales in a measurable way. I think Blizzard is headed for a cash winner with their strategy here.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I’m not quite sure about those dollar figures you came up with, but you’re right that making quality campaigns is really difficult and involved. And the reason Blizzard is going to be releasing those campaigns separately? As you said, because they make more money from it — but the only reason they can even get away with it is because they’re Blizzard. I don’t think another publisher could get away with it. Imagine if EA tried to pull something similar.