Starcraft 2 - worth buying?

[Hammerskjold]

All over the place I'm hearing that people going into the music business are being encouraged to try to revolutionize the industry to fix this problem but I have not heard one realistic idea yet. We'll see.

With music and movies, we can argue that it has the communal aspect that is pretty duplicate-resistant. Yeah there's the T-Shirt bootleggers and unapproved unofficial concert recordings, but even now they're not exactly broadcast quality. Though I guess they could be subverted if the band handles them as unpaid advertising. eg: youtube.

And unless we're going to see holodeck technology come to pass within the next decade, there's still something about going to a movie premiere (or concert\live performance) especially if it's a movie you look forward to seeing, with fellow fans. There's an excitement and energy that simply can't be duplicated and fully captured in a blu-ray disc.

(We'll leave aside for a second the benefits of seeing a movie\listening to music privately without having to deal with the hassle of inconsiderate a-holes who treats every public space as their own living room.)

Now I think it gets more tricky with video games. LAN parties\net cafe\live tournaments does have some live interaction, communal aspect to it. But most of the games involved are competitive in nature. As of this time, it's probably more accurate to say it's more of an e-sport.

Guitar Hero\Rock Band is probably close to party\board game night type of interaction. (Don't get me wrong, it's damn fun, I've read some bars hold a Guitar Hero night event, but it's not something you'd probably pay to see as a concert.)

MMOGs have and depends greatly on the social interaction, but players can play in their own physical space, no real need in having them together in a shared meat-space for the game to work. A big draw for them or any other multi-player online game is that you can play with\against someone halfway across the world.

And some of my favourite video gaming moment are games that are Single Player, the communication happens between the creator and the audience-player. There's no real 'concert' equivalent of that.

So pirating an SP game can potentially hurt the developers-creators more vs a subscription model. Not only does that suck for the creators, but I think it doesn't bode well either for players. I'd hate to see the day that SP games are relegated to either Console only, and even then it needs an online component to be able to play. Or nearly every game (especially triple A titles) is a subscription based model, even for SP.

I guess the gift \ curse of a video game is how complex it can be. It doesn't always readily fit into any one existing model.

So circling back the original topic of SC2, if they drop the 'every 30 days revalidation' and region lock for multi, I'd be a lot more interested. Otherwise, there's always other games and companies. Or vacuuming. My floor can always use some more vacuuming.