Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Starcraft II will be free to play

4:16 PM / Games / CommentsNo Comments

Games

Quelling the fears of a lot of concerned gamers, worried by cagey responses from Blizzard Entertainment spokespersons, we now have explicit confirmation from the company's president himself, Mike Morhaime, that the upcoming Starcraft II (due to go into beta this summer with an eye to the retail version of Wings of Liberty, the first of three instalments, coming out towards the end of the year) will be free to play over Blizzard's online Battle.net service.

As per an audio interview with Morhaime:

With respect to Starcraft [II...] our philosophy on pricing strategies and things like that is really not to tip our hand until we get closer to release. We do look at each local market and we want to devise pricing strategies that are culturally appropriate for each local market [...]

What I will say is that a player who [...] buys the Starcraft II box at retail will have the full Starcraft [II] game included in the box, and they will have the ability to play on Battle.net with no additional fees.

(Emphasis mine.)

I'm not entirely sure what "pricing strategies that are culturally appropriate for each local market" means. If this were a console game, I'd take it to mean that Blizzard will be reflecting Europe's long-standing culture of shafting its gamers with late release dates and exorbitant price tags, but at least at the moment Starcraft II is a PC exclusive, and as such these issues are unlikely to apply. The extent to which Blizzard personnel have sidestepped and continue to sidestep certain aspects of the pricing issue leads me to suspect that the company may still attempt to charge additional fees for optional "opt-in" content, but for the time being, I'm happy to finally have express confirmation from about as high up as you can get that, once I'm holding a copy of the game in my hands, I'll be able to log on to Battle.net and start competing against other players without first having to get out my credit card.

 
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