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> when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money. Strictly speaking, you can:
by TulliusCicero 4y ago
> when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money.
Strictly speaking, you can: both StarCraft 1 and StarCraft 2 have free versions.
You do need to pay for the HD graphics for SC1 though, and for SC2 you'd have to pay for some campaigns or co-op commanders. And it's quite common for eSports to be free to play, with mostly just charging for cosmetics.
I get what you mean, though: even if there are free versions, it's still explicitly under the game developer's control.
- aflag 4y agoI think the point is more that you can't play without blizzard's consent. You can't just download the game and host your own server to play with your friends. If blizzard changes the rules (makes a patch) you need to play with the new rules. You can't host a server if the starcraft 2 servers are down (not that uncommon nowadays). If blizzard decides to stop the servers (or if it just goes under), you can't play anymore. That's a very different relationship from NFL or MLB.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoYou are generally correct, but this being HN I'm gonna do some informative nitpicks anyway: * SC2 works as you say, but from what I remember SC1's Korean leagues were run without Blizzard's consent/management. Obviously with SC2 they then 'fixed the glitch'. Probably the same for SC Remastered as well. * There's an interesting case where the old C&C games are being slowly reimplemented in full by open source coders, in which case I imagine EA can't do anything even if they wanted to: https://www.openra.net/ https://www.openra.net/