No Subscription Fees for Battle.net or Diablo III, Hellgate's Failure Used As Reference - hellforge

Quick recap: Jay Wilson mentions at BlizzCon that Battle.net will be monetized in some way or another. Cue justified outrage.

Today, Joystiq spoke with Blizzard's Rob Pardo regarding the minor controversy to which he cleared up the issue by saying that there will be absolutely no subscription fees to play Diablo III.

So Julian (Jay) Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?

Wow, that's an evil way of putting it. Julian's turning into a business guy on me. Here's the way I would put it. We're definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game. It's clearly not an MMO, so it's not appropriate to do a business model like that. The way we approach all of our games now, is we come up with what we think is a great game, and then we wrap the appropriate business model around it. If that's just a box price, then that's that.

With Battle.Net we're definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We're not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We're not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.

Hellgate directly referenced. Flagshipping avoided.