par Zu » 09 Juillet 2010, 15:34
ci après une Interview sur UsaToday de Greg Canessa.
More from our discussion with Blizzard's Canessa:
How did this development come about?
Go back to the previous Battle.net, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and Steam and other different networks in the context of gaming services. they are all kind of anonymous. That whole veil of anonymity has been an important part of the design. There are those who feel like I want to go escape and create this parallel identity to myself on a gaming network and I don't want anyone to know who I am in real life. What we have seen in recent years is that veil of anonymity has been cast aside largely. Culturally, I think we have become more and more accepting of social networking in the context of your real identity and Facebook, of course as the leader in the space, has led this charge. We're now at something five years ago I don't think any of us would maybe necessarily be comfortable with. We all now have our own Facebook pages and we have got a lot of our information on there. We've got our real names and pictures of ourselves on there and so forth.
Here at Blizzard we have seen the social networks as an inspiration to us to really think about what the next stage of the online gaming space will look like. What if we gave people the option to display themselves by their real name and create a social network of real-life friends connecting that Blizzard community based on their real names? So what we are doing is we are introducing this feature called Real ID, an optional layer of identity on top of the standard character level of identity you would have on any game service.
So for StarCraft II on Battle.net you can create a StarCraft II character â?S and set up a friends network and it's completely anonymous and exist on that level and be completely happy. But if you like, you may decide 'I have a lot of other friends on Battle.net and I would love to create a social network that connects all my friends who play Blizzard games together so I can chat with them, socialize, create a party and go off and play games together'. With Real ID, what you essentially do is type in your real-life friend's email address and it will send them a Real ID friend request on Battle.net. When they log in they will have to accept that friend request, very much like on Facebook. And once they have accepted it, you have a mutually-accepted relationship that spans all the Blizzard games. You can see each other by your real names on Battle.net. You can send each other broadcast messages and you can chat across games. You can see what game they are playing and what character they are logged in as across World of Warcraft, StarCraft II and Diablo III moving forward and future titles. You also get some rich presence features that tell you 'Greg Canessa is playing StarCraft II with this character in a 2v2 ranked match' or 'Is playing World of Warcraft on a certain server sitting around Dalaran'.
So what part does Facebook officially play, then?
The feature we are shipping with is this 'Add A Friend' feature. I can log into Battle.net and instead of knowing your email address or deduce who you are by Real ID, I can simply log into Facebook within a special interface we have created in Battle.net and import, if you will, all my friends who are on Facebook and are also on Battle.net into my social network here on Battle.net. Essentially, with one click I'm populating my social network in Battle.net on Facebook.
I would assume that the Facebook relationship would be used to draw more casual game players to Blizzard's games.
Absolutely. Our goal and vision in this partnership is to really to cross-populate the social networks and to easily find and add your friends from Facebook onto the new Battle.net service as the first step and extending it to other features in the future. â?S Later on, of course, we have lots of things we are talking about with Facebook. We haven't announced anything specific, but we have lots of ideas about ways to cross-populate and share data between the two services.
What will the interface look like with this Facebook information included?
We are actually fully integrating with the Facebook team. When you buy StarCraft II, You are going to install it and, if you have not already created a Battle.net account, you will create one and you will input your CD key to register with the game. Once you double-click on that StarCraft game for the first time on your desktop, you will go in and it will be an always-connected experience. You are going to input your username and password, just as you do, say with World of Warcraft. And from that point on, you are always connected to the Blizzard servers. Even though StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, you are always going to be connected to the service.
When you go to set up that social network and you go to that 'Add a Friend' button, there is an interface that pops up and there is going to be a button right there that says, 'Got Facebook? Click here.' If you click on that button, you are going to log into Facebook, right there within the Battle.net interface, in the game. You are going to type in our Facebook username and password and it will say, 'Searching your Facebook friends list for friends' and then it will pop open this interface with your Facebook friends on one side and your Battle.net friends on the other side and you will be able to click and selectively add them to your Battle.net network. Say you select five of your friends that you would like to invite, it will send them invitations. So the next time they log into Battle.net, they will be able to accept those friends invites and create Real ID relationships. You will also be able to accept those Real ID relationships in World of Warcraft, too.
Do you expect any push back from diehard Blizzard fans from the Facebook features?
We don't anticipate any. We are going to be very clear and upfront with the user. Once they log in and create a Battle.net account for the first time, if they choose to participate in Real ID, it is of course, an optional set of features that you don't have to participate in. Beyond that we are going to notify them upfront their names could be used to populate via Facebook and how their names could be used via this Facebook feature.
Ils n'ont rien anticipé des réactions des européens ni finalement des américains eux-mêmes. hallucinant.