However, in the case of Diablo III a lot of this integration comes with the fact that Battle.net has so many social capabilities it just made sense to do this. They need Battle.net to function as an authenticator as well as a social service. The new RealID features have only made World of Warcraft better, not worse. I don’t fault Blizzard in the least. Social gaming is the way of the world now and requiring an internet connection, unless you are traveling, isn’t a big deal. We all have always-on internet now.

id Software’s Tim Willits would seem to agree. “In the end it’s better for everybody. Imagine picking up a game and it’s automatically updated. Or there’s something new you didn’t know about, and you didn’t have to click.” He makes an excellent point. World of Warcraft and Steam both provide automatic updates which are just very user friendly. You don’t have to lift a finger most of the time to update your games on these platforms. If DRM is the side effect in this case, I’m okay with that.

He also infers that more and more this will be come the norm as big developers such as Blizzard use the model. The more connected we become, the less you will even notice.

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