In case you are late to this whole affair. Diablo 3 requires a persistent online connection, which resulted in a massive outrage in the online communities. It was believed that this move was made to combat piracy and is extremely anti-consumer. However, Blizzard denied this today. Robert Bridenbecker, Vice President of Online Technologies at Blizzard had a lot to say regarding this controversy, “I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and the requirement around that.”
“We’ve been doing online gameplay for 15 years now… and with World of Warcraft and our roots in Battle.net and now with Diablo 3, it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that.”
“Internally I don’t think [DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate,” he said.
“Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You’re guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes. All of these things were points of discussion, but the whole copy protection, piracy thing, that’s not really entering into why we want to do it.”
“I’m a huge purveyor of online sites and from my standpoint, I don’t look at DRM solutions and go, ‘Wow, those are awesome.’ I look at those and say, ‘Wow, those kind of suck.’ But if there’s a compelling reason for you to have that online connectivity that enhances the gameplay, that doesn’t suck. That’s awesome.”
He said that gamers have nothing to worry about and this will be not intrusive but a part of evolution.
Via Eurogamer