Almost as if they've been reading our last thread, Triforge -- the PC games company formed in March by three ex-Blizzard developers -- has announced a change of name to Arena.net and a new publishing strategy.

The three Blizzard veterans, recently joined by a computer science professor and an ex-Microsoft developer, will publish their own games exclusively online.

In an interview on GameSpy, Arena.net's Pat Wyatt has already made two confident statements. He predicted that "because our games are server hosted, cheating will never be an issue", and that "our games will be less expensive than retail games". (No mention of how much less expensive, though...)

There's one question that should perhaps be raised at this point, especially as the new era of online-publishing is still untested and is bound to claim a few scalps along the way: If a game is multiplayer-based and can only be played on the developer's own centralised servers, what happens if the company shuts down?

The obvious answer is that people can't play the game anymore, so perhaps a better question would be: What can be done about it?