Korean police raid Blizzard’s offices following Diablo 3 complaints

Posted By: Michael Lacerna In: Console News, Gaming News, PC On: 01 Jun

Officials from the Korean government (who probably didn’t look anything like the ones above… Probably,) raided Blizzard’s offices in South Korea this week, following a large number of complaints from Korean consumers regarding Diablo 3′s frequent service outages.

Diablo 3 launched recently to rave reviews and an unprecedented amount of sales, and Blizzard’s servers have been getting hammered ever since the game went live. The game uses a type of DRM that requires players to always been connected to Blizzard’s Battle.net servers, even when playing single player.

The frequent server issues and DRM have apparently kept a lot of Korean gamers from playing the game they paid for, and many have filed formal complaints with the government regarding the problem. Blizzard’s terms of service for the game implicitly states that they will not issue refunds for the game based on server outages, but the Korean government is currently investigating whether that part of the contract violates any consumers’ rights laws in Korea.

The report doesn’t state what evidence exactly the FTC collected, but I’m assuming they collected anything that pertains to Diablo 3′s server status and preparation… or maybe they just wanted free copies of Diablo 3. Either way, this is just another cautionary tale to publishers about the potential hazards of always online DRM.

Source: The Korea Times