Here's my vision of the future. I'm going to go to the store and buy a bunch of cardboard boxes containing things like food I want to eat, games I want to play, clothes I want to wear. Then I'm going to come home and log onto my Xbox 360 and repurchase all those items with the online codes the boxes contain so that they can be shipped to my house.

When those items arrive they will be locked in a safe that I must enter a 20 digit key code to unlock them. Then I'll use my authenticator to activative them to my DNA, so that if anyone else tries to eat my food, wear my clothes, play my games, etc. it self destructs on them. This way all the farmers, sweat shop slave laborers, and game programmers get their fair share of the items they created. I can't wait for the freaking future!!!

Yes but after you run a dungeon so many times it gets to be old hat. I did all the dungeons, nearly every quest line at end game, collected lots of artifacts (not all as the lower level zones didn't hold much interest for me) and built up reputations. I wasn't interested in PvP as it was too gear dependent and frankly WoWs PvP zones were far, far better. I completed all the upper end rifts but as I said before I had no interest in returning to the lower end zone to complete achievements for lower level rift events.

After 3-4 months the only thing I had left to do was run daily quests, daily rifts and raid. I tried raiding again, but I just hate waiting around for groups. Someone is always late, or skips or has to smoke/walk the dog. The single/dual player instances were just rehashed/spoon feed raids that really didn't grab my interest.

Crafting in Rift was for the most part a waste of time. You could barely make money from the AH, because everything was junk and players had too many professions. I tried playing some other classes, but they just weren't as fun as my first profession. The character classes in WoW were more deverse. There was more than one starting location per faction, so you could experience different things in WoW when you started a new character.

I played Rift for 7 months after quitting WoW. Running through the original story was fun and the random Rift encounters were a blast of freshness to the same old MMORPG formula. But getting to level cap kinda ended the fun for me. I love 5 man groups, especially when group generators were established, but raiding to me is just not fun. With 10 or 25 man groups, it seems like you are always waiting on somebody. I want to play a game to lose myself in a fantasy world, not to sit around waiting to get enough people to work on an encounter. The rift aspect was far more dynamic than the raid aspect. Why aren't raids more dynamic? Why do you have to raid to get the best gear? Why aren't random 5 man instances in MMORPGs. I'm holding out hope that Guild Wars 2 will not be shackled to the old "waiting game" perpetuated in end game raids of all MMOs I've played so far.

The best game of this genre (to me) is Titan Quest, then D2 and then Torchlight. Titan Quest was beautiful and huge, plus it had the most character customization ever. Torchlight is a beautiful game that doesn't force you to play it over and over again for harder difficultly levels, but the characters had too much of the same skills spread across the classes. D3 would probably be fun solo, but I don't want to play it on-line. Sadly the stunning success of D3 will create more DRM games down the road. I'm tired of the same story, especially with the same character after one or two play-throughs. D3 forces 4 upon you. As of this time I'm not motivated to buy D3.

The real money aution house will make teaming/grouping a huge loser. I don't know how loot is distributed, but if it's like WoW with NEED/GREED everyone will become ninjas and make grouping with strangers non-existant. If you sell something for $10, you get $1 transaction fee, plus $3 in fees (to get cash) plus another $0.30 cents to use paypal, so you earn $5.70 for every $10 you sell. Further, I bet you have to report that on your income tax. To me that's just not worth selling and I'm way too cheap to purchase anything.

Sad to say, but the best possible outcome for the consumer is for Activision to win. No Doubt entered into a contract to be on Guitar Hero, No Doubt should've been more thorough in their review of the contract language. In the end games/albums will cost more if artists can decide they don't like the terms and conditions they signed and get rewarded for changing their minds.

All of the xboxs sold with improper soldering will fail of the RROD, that means all of the units manufactured the first 3 years. MS just extended the warranty 3 years, so if you box failed outside of the warranty period, you are up the creek w/out a paddle. MS didn't help anyone who fell outside the warranty period for that RROD crap, like me. I'm still PO'ed at MS. At a minimum I should've recieved a discount toward the purchase of a new Xbox.

I'm more PO'ed at Sony and the junk Bravia TV I bought off them, however. Worldwide leader in TV's my back-side!!!

To me, 38 Studios tried to be top tier production studio, without doing all the groundwork to establish themselves. Supporting 300 to 450 employees at say an average salary of $75 K, takes $22.5 M to $33.8 M per year. Assuming you get say 3M unit sales of $60/unit over the first year for Amalur, the studio can net at best $90M. (More than likely their contracts won't even net them 50% of total sales though). At 1.2 unit sales they are looking at $36 M in potential revenue. They would need to release an Amular every 12 months at a sustained 1.2 unit sales just to break even on their payroll.

What would an MMO do for them? Say they make $10/mon on a subscription and retain the magic number of 500 K players? That's $5 M per month or $60 M per year. An MMO could fuel their labor costs plus physical server costs, but it wouldn't be a profitable company either.

While Amalur IP may be valued at $20M who is going to pay that for it? The state of RI will be lucky to recoup one loan payment of $1.125 M by selling the IP. It probably would've been better for RI to keep quiet about the studios financial woes. As others have said, publicizing the problem only scared investors away, to the point where the company had to shut down. Either way RI played it, they get no money returned, the latter way may have eventually lead to a partial repayment. While Schilling may have invest $30 M in the company, I bet he personally had no net loss due to the RI deal. What a scumbag!

Was Diablo always a "single-player" game? For me it was, but it's always had a multiplayer component. Suffice it to say, Diablo had always been capable of "single-player" play, but with the constant internet connection it no longer is. Now it's definately a "multiplayer" game with a solo option. If you play MMOs there are always people who prefer to solo things, yet when they complain that there's not enough solo content the typical response is "go play a single player game." The inherent success of D3 will essentially erode the desire of developers to create "single-player" games.

Anyways, in terms of the review are the environments really that varied by the random generator? Diablo 2 had a basic structure to it, so to me the maps (while different) didn't seem that different on successive play-throughs. Is that the case with D3 or is it much more varied than D2 as the reviewer implies?

Also in D2, I got bored after the second play-through or so and never really tried out the hardest level "Hell." It's probably part and parcel to the lack of varied maps from play-through to play-through in D2. Is that much of the same thing for D3 as well? To me, I'm not interested in playing through the game 4 times to complete the hardest levels. I'm also not interested in tagging up with a high-leveled group to be power leveled. Can I expect more of the same with D3?

If you're having so much fun with D3 why are you here? Having the internet and having high speed internet are not the same thing. I agree with liam, the sheep have just made games worse players by setting record sales for D3.

It doesn't matter if D3 is fun. I'm sure it's an enjoyable game, to an extent. Titan Quest, Torchlight, Diablo 2 and other games of this nature were/are fun as well. It was even better that those games didn't require an internet connection to have fun.

Blizzard missed a huge opportunity for profit in my book, but that won't happen with D4. You can bet the next iteration of this series will be P2P and the sheep will flock in even greater numbers.

@beuneus12 I didn't think it was necessary to specify how they made $100/account or even if this was the actual value. As @adam270391 stated, gold is one method of making money from a stolen account. In WoW, max level characters were often stolen, raided for gold and sold as well. Plus gear can be pretty lucrative, however I imagine the best gear isn't available and I'm not sure how good blizzards servers are at stopping character/gear transactions.