While I'm very (very) excited for this game.. I'm very nervous about my productivity this summer. There are few things that can pull me away from coding. This is one of them.
Maybe D3 will open some new startup opportunities? Yes.. yes that's what I'll tell myself. It's all research.
You could sell a game guide for D3, however Blizzard legal hates those. They've done stuff like file takedown notices with ebay, over and over. Then when the guy filed a counter notice, they refused to go to court, waited for the time period to expire, then started filing more takedowns for his new game guide auctions. This disgusting behavior got his ebay account suspended! And they refused to ever explain specifically how the game guide violates their copyright or trademark (hint: it doesn't.).
I personally wanted to make a game guide for Infinity Blade 2 but epic legal threatened me out of it (and we had a friendly pre-existing relationship, which counted for exactly nothing. they'd interviewed me for their website and sent me free stuff, and i had a free guide on their forum with 200k views that they had made sticky). Dealing with their legal crap wasn't worth the hassle. I was even willing to give them undeserved money to be left alone, but they wanted a large cash payment upfront and were unwilling to discuss any other payment approach.
Anyway the point is game guides should be a pretty good small business opportunity -- there is a very real market for help playing games better and being more successful in them -- but there are (baseless but real) legal problems so be wary.
You might expect game companies to be thrilled to have services sold around their games, which their customers find provides game-related value to them. Just like Apple is happy to see other people selling iPhone cases. But a lot of game companies are not happy and will harass you.
It seems to me that usually these game companies have a publishing (as in, books) branch that manages the official guides. THEY'RE the ones who can't accept any competition, possibly due to their contracts with Prima/Brady (or whoever).
Yeah of course it's fair use. A guide is a commentary work and it's not even close to substituting for someone buying the game. The point of copyright law is for the copyright owners to be able to make a profit -- copyright is to help encourage people to make and sell stuff. You aren't competing for sales with their game, so there's basically no way you're violating the game copyright. Just don't include video walkthroughs of the whole game (which could actually be a substitute good for buying the game).
If they've published their own game guide, just don't take any material from it and you won't be violating any copyrights on that either.
For trademark, the point is to prevent consumers from being confused about who is responsible for products, so people can build up a brand name and have a reputation they are responsible for and have control over. Guide titles like, "Ubergeek's Ultimate Unofficial Guide to Diablo 3" do not violate trademark because they do not cause any confusion about whose product this is. It's well established that you can use someone else's trademark as a substring in your product title when it's important to explaining what your product is and won't cause consumer confusion. (Similarly, "Pegasus Case for iPhone" or "Ubergeek's iPod Battery Replacement Kit" would not violate trademark.)
But, yes, as you say: being completely right doesn't prevent you having to defend yourself and spending time and money on that. (Could you recoup lawyers fees after you win? I have no idea about that.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. (But I have read some legal sources about this.)
I would lie if I said the same thought hadn't crossed my mind... while we are still in the era of comments like yours (and mind) being brushed off somewhat half-jokingly, can you even imagine in 10-20 years what kind of addiction-causing experience games will be?
I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games like WoW and the new Star Wars MMO will be child's play.
In 10 years I expect the phenomenon of losing your job or your relationship over game addiction will be much wider spread and we may see an effort by the govt to put caps on experiences in 15 years.
Once you can capture most all the methods of input from a player and produce multiple levels of output all for the purpose of engaging the player longer and longer, there has to be a governor at some point... until 25+ years from now where the tech is so advanced that some people's jobs are just to exist in these virtual worlds (i.e. marketers for Apple sitting at social hubs inside of Galaxy of Warcraft 50.0 talking people into checking out the new iPad inside the game where they can click a button to pre-order it in real life after playing with a 3D model of it in virtual-life).
China has the demographics for pervasive addiction today with its moderately educated, underemployed, sexually-suppressed overpopulation of males (35M more males than females in 2009). This should lead to massive political unrest as in the Arab Spring and the knee-capped Iranian revolt of '09, but hasn't. I suspect that a significant force behind this pacification is gaming. Instead of banning Skinner boxes like WoW outright, the Party asserts control by dictating how much XP such games can deliver (cynically, drip), at what rates, for how long per day.
Without doing anything 105 Men are born per 100 woman. With a population of ~1.338 billion you would expect up to 1000/205 * 5 = 32 million extra men. Men don't live as long as woman on average which tends to balance the genders. But, China's population demographics are also messed up from 1 child policy so it's a little more complex than you might think.
I agree there is a mental pandemic to be. Imagine 20 years out when ultraporn, AI, and VR helmets are a suitable replacement to having a relationship with real humans. I'm all for tech, but I think that tech that splits us up and disconnects us really does make us a little less human. There's another side to it that lonely people could technically be happier in such a configuration, so maybe my argument is nullified by realizing it's just a tool and it's people that are at fault. I think I just did a 180 in a single post.
I am very familiar with this thought process... "being totally hooked in is evil and detrimental because movies show me they are!" -- but then you think about it... what if your life IS just better in the virtual reality? How is that a bad thing?
You are here to have an experience, logging on and having that experience elsewhere is fine if it isn't destroying lives around you.
Then you think 40 or 50 years out with undetectable differences between virtual reality and real-reality and you wonder if at some point we did get lost in a virtual world we created for ourselves a la Matrix... how would we know?
You could also imagine a world within a world once the virtual world is so real it isn't as fun.
I lost a couple years of life to playing MUDs a while back. Still occasionally log on, the ability to type commands makes it much easier to have a complex game and environment, but not so much with the pretty pictures.
Luckily, I've sworn off Blizzard since they sued the bnetd guys, so D3 isn't a concern for me.
I play minecraft with my son, who's 10, but it doesn't appeal to me that greatly beyond playing with him. Dwarf Fortress and Crawl, on the other hand, can end up sucking hours of my day if I'm not careful.
The great thing about roguelikes is that you can only play them so long before you decide to make a random map generator, and then a line of sight algorithm, and implement A* pathfinding and suddenly you're making your own.
Do you really think that individuals will be able to make any money with this system? Farming versus INSERT INTO Loot (...) doesn't seem like a fair fight.
I suspect that you'll have Blizzard not only taxing transactions, but being the counter-party in many of them anyway. If they can control the drop rate for farmers (and hence the perceived value), yet can materialize items at will what's to stop them from turning it into an infinite money machine?
As with any currency, if we expect blizzard to create tons of items (inflation) then their price will be devalued appropriately. Unexpected inflation could benefit them initially, but it would also turn people away from the game.
You'll be able to make some money but the number of hours it will take you to find the loot will make it a dismal waste of your time, financially speaking.
Maybe D3 will open some new startup opportunities? Yes.. yes that's what I'll tell myself. It's all research.