I pay a monthly fee of just under $15 to play World of Warcraft. Periodically, they’ll make minor patches in the game play, and I’ll have to waste a few hours (I’m on dialup, remember) downloading a small fix for some bug. I’m okay with that. It’s just a few hours.

Then there are the big patches. As we speak, I’m waiting for a 24MB patch to download (This is the smallest “big” patch I remember. Most of them are several times larger than that.). I’m not sure how the Blizzard Downloader works, but it’s normally much, much slower than a direct download, and it’s usually nigh-impossible to get a direct download anyway (Blizzard doesn’t offer them, but you can sometimes get them from sites like FileFront).

CDs can be found easily for $0.25 – $0.30 retail. Postage for those CDs can’t be that much, or Netflix would never make any money. Overnight shipping would be prohibitively expensive, I guess, but normal shipping only takes a couple of days, which is faster than some of us can download these things, especially if we rely on Blizzard’s downloader.
Why doesn’t Blizzard give their subscribers the option of having a CD mailed to them? Heck, I’d even be okay with it if they charged me a couple of extra bucks every time there was a big update if I knew that I’d be getting a CD a day or two later that I could use to update my PC (and keep on file in case I ever needed to reinstall and reupdate later). If the game was only playable by gamers using high speed internet, I’d almost understand, but the game is fairly playable by those of us on dialup; it makes no sense to design the updates to discriminate against us.

I really like SciFi.com’s Sci Fi Wire, but sometimes, it seems like they make up rumors just so that they can debunk them.

First, they reported on the possibility of Firefly Season Two, a possibility that Joss Whedon has debunked several times. Still, the fact that it was reported in Sci Fi Wire made me think that there must be some new development. The new development? Some random guy online that no one has ever heard of:

A spokesman for Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly and its spinoff movie, Serenity, told SCI FI Wire that Whedon hasn’t heard of Ace Underhill, an entrepreneur who said he is trying to acquire the rights to the SF TV franchise for purposes of mounting a second season to be distributed in alternative media. “Joss doesn’t really know anything about that guy, and I don’t really think he has a comment,” Whedon’s spokesman said in response to questions about Underhill’s efforts.

For his part, Underhill told SCI FI Wire that he has contacted Whedon’s representatives about starting up a new season of Firefly, which the Fox broadcast network canceled after a single season in 2003, but hadn’t spoken with Whedon directly. Whedon previously told USA Today that he still hopes to tell more stories set in Serenity’s futuristic universe, though Firefly as it was is dead. He later told Empire Online that he remains open to doing another TV series.

So… there’s no reason to believe that Fox has sold (or will sell) the rights, no reason to believe that Joss Whedon or any of the stars are interested, and the envisioned series would be a direct pay-per-view model. While I’ve been saying that the idea of lower-budget television series that focused on telling good stories and were directly sold to their target markets was an interesting one, I don’t see a television network selling the rights to an established (though not immensely popular) franchise for a price that a direct-to-consumers series could support. I’d like to be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m not.

Secondly, Sci Fi Wire lets us know that a Willow movie doesn’t look likely. Well, that’s important information, but everything I’ve heard has been rumors of an Angel follow-up, most likely one starring James Marsters’s Spike character. Even though a Willow movie makes more sense if the movie can’t be done right now (unlike Angel, Spike, or a few other characters, Alyson Hannigan’s character is human, which makes her aging less of a problem).

Most of these non-stories seem to revolve around Joss Whedon’s shows. Maybe I’m just out of the loop, and his fan base is constantly generating insane rumors, or maybe Sci-Fi Wire is getting desperate for something to print, but it really seems like they’re stretching lately.