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Diablo 3

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KvP:
There's always been a lot of crowing about charging for Battle.net but I remain skeptical of the claims of its apparent unworkability. People said the same thing when they started charging for WoW (battle.net was a free service for many years prior to that) and they still ended up with a never-before-seen number of players. Griping on the internet is easy to ignore and the number of people who will protest by not playing will be minimal from a sales standpoint, as long as the game works and is as well designed as Blizzard's games have been in the past and Blizzard doesn't gouge (and if they charge for battle.net they probably won't).

The internet is a warped prism through which to view future possibilities. Remember NMA and Fallout 3? They kicked and screamed about the wrongness of it all throughout development. I'd wager at least 90% of them bought the game on release. Remember when Ron Paul was going to be a formidable force in the '08 elections? Yeah. The number of Ron Paul voters is probably the number of highly principled gamers (at best), and more people will have bought D3 than voted. High-profile games to gamers are as candy to children. The only circumstances under which it isn't wanted is when it's bad.

0bsessions:
The reason Blizzard will probably not charge for Battle.net is WoW. Doing something like that, unless it came with a discount on WoW (Much like Sony's Station Plan a few years back that you could access their entire range of MMOs for $30 a month), would serve only to cut into WoW's userbase.

KvP:
Possibly, but all failures of competing MMOs aside I don't think we've seen a compelling case for market saturation in the multiplayer gaming world. Diablo 3 will be a different beast from WoW. It isn't an MMO and presumably it won't require the sort of time commitments that WoW does. That opens up a lot of player markets that WoW hasn't tapped.

Chesire Cat:
Im with obsessions on this one, making a pay for play MMORPG will be poaching from Blizzards own userbase.  Unless Diablo 3 is marketed to be a WoW killer, I doubt they will charge for it.

And this is based of market analysis and not my personal opinion on how swell the guys at Blizzard are, because that is a rather inaccurate barometre (or in this case thermometre) to go by.

Alex C:
There's compelling reasons for going either direction. The benefit of charging is obvious, so I won't bother touching on that. As for why it would remain free, I would like to point out that charging a monthly subscription raises expectations that Blizzard may not be comfortable taking on at this point. Quite simply, people cut you more slack when your service is free, and battlenet would have a large player base to cater to even if charging money did end up thinning the herd. Keep in mind the vast majority of Blizzard employees work in WoW customer service as it is. Such a move could still probably end up being quite profitable if handled correctly, but on the other hand it really may not really be worth all the fuss when you consider the costs and how much of the playerbase you could cannibalize, particularly since Bnet already serves as a great gateway drug into online gaming and the Warcraft universe as it is. A lot of online gamers are still teens who can't hold credit cards or cannot convince their parents to blow a wad of money on perhaps the nerdiest of hobbies. There's benefits to keeping those kids in-house and I guarantee you that there's people playing WoW right now who got into online gaming in the first place thanks to Bnet.

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