[Sir_Substance]

>Secondly, why pay for Starcraft when I can just play Starcraft-JS for free?

In the world I would like to live in, Blizzard game devs would see this as a challenge and aspire to make games of sufficient quality that they fairly out-compete a scrappy open source js pretender.

The state of the gaming industry being what it is these days though, theres a solid chance of this project producing an objectivly better game than Blizzard is currently capable of making.

[nkrisc]

In your world consumers would be unable to tell the difference between the crappy clones and the original and probably give up on all of them.

Blizzard is, rightfully, concerned about consumers being confused and thinking that they are somehow involved in this endeavor.

Lastly, if their scrappy open source game is better than Blizzard's, they shouldn't need Blizzard's assets. Unless of course, it was the Starcraft identity that made it "good" in the first place.

[mikeash]

In the world I would like to live in, customers who want to play Starcraft wouldn't have to do a bunch of research to figure out which one is Blizzard's and which one is the pretender.

[Razengan]

In the world you would like to live in, every product would have over a hundred Chinese knockoffs with the same name, luring patrons away from each other with advertisements featuring big-busted ladies or cute fluffy cartoons, and no one would have any incentive to put effort into making games of sufficient quality that aren't a free-to-play front for milking in-app purchases.

For a preview of such a world, see the App Store and Google Play.

[Sir_Substance]

>For a preview of such a world, see the App Store and Google Play.

Yeah, because no one could call that a success. There is definitely widespread agreement among the populous that such things are far too difficult to deal with and that life was better before.

/s

[Razengan]

Tell me, why make a Grim Fandango or The Room when you can make far more money for far less effort with a Verby Noun or Clash of Things?

Apparently any quality is sufficient to be a success.

[Sir_Substance]

That's not the influence of the app store, it's the influence of an influx of marketing staff and investment capital.

Games went from being a niche thing that only people who cared got involved in to a big business, and in the process the priority shifted from "make good games" to "use dodgy tricks and known mental blind spots to manipulate people into paying the maximum possible amount for a product".

The people who actually care about games are being squeezed into indie studios or right out of the business, because they keep saying inconvenient things like "the skins model compromises my vision for the game, I refuse to do it".

To be brutally honest, as a life long gamer I see more merit in starcraft-js than I do in the starcraft II series.