When Activision acquired Blizzard Entertainment, just about everyone knelt down and said a prayer to whatever their higher power was in hopes that Blizzard would not be corrupted by the larger publisher.

It appears as though prayer has failed.

During a panel discussion at BlizzCon 08, Diablo III director Jay Wilson told an audience that Blizzard and Activision were looking to potentially “monetize” Battle.net. There weren’t any details offered by Wilson, but he did at least tell us why Blizzard wants to monetize Battle.net — and it may make you laugh*:

We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features. We kind of have to.

‘Have to’, sure. Because the $132 million a month from subscription fees ($1.58B annually) for World of Warcraft just isn’t enough to keep the struggling Blizzard open, now is it? Oh, surely not.

But wait! If you find Blizzard’s intent to charge you for Battle.net to be bad enough, hold onto your asses: Blizzard is also getting into EA-style microtransactions. At a different Q&A session with fans, Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack confirmed that World of Warcraft will one day see “Paid Character Customization”. From fansite WarCry:

When asked to expand upon a button found by sifting through the Lich King beta’s data files named “Paid Character Customization,” [World of Warcraft production director J. Allen] Brack initially hesitated to give any answer at all. Several questions later, he went back to the matter, saying that he could, in fact, confirm that World of Warcraft would eventually have some form of paid character customization, though they themselves hadn’t yet worked out any details.

So it’s safe to say that this paid customization content won’t be showing up in WoW for a while. All the same, something about this smells and I am none too pleased about it.

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