Beware the blizzard of torrents of Starcraft 2
Expense accounts
Starcraft 2 was released this week and at the hefty RRP of £45. Many games sites are hopping mad at this, although typically retailers are selling Blizzard's strategy game at £10 less than RRP.
The price is of little consequence to gamers who download pirate versions of SC2 from the torrents.
But beware, says Andrew Brandt of the security company Webroot. Some SC2 torrents appear to "bring along a side dish of malware".
One, supposedly a custom game launcher, drops the Zbot keylogger Trojan, for example.
Nothing new here, but the sub-text is that the aggravation you go through cleaning up an infected PC much outweighs the cost of buying a retail copy of SC2. Few torrent users will take notice.
Despite the piracy, Blizzard will make a killing from SC2. It is expected to sell 3m copies this week and 7m by the end of the year.
COMMENTS
Pointless?
There seems to me to be little point to torrenting SC2 anyway. One of the other things the other things the forum spods are complaining about is the link to Battle.Net. Basically, having the code doesn't let you do much more than launch it. To actually get into the game, you have to log into it with a Battle.net account that has a Starcraft 2 licence code registered against it. So if you don't have a licence you can't play the game. if you DO have a licence, Blizzard will let you download a copy of it from their website free of charge and their downloader works using a peer to peer protocol anyway. Just that several of the peers are whopping great net servers on fat pipes, rather than being other spods with a 512K upload connection.
So just 'stealing' the code is essentially useless. If you can somehow get a licence you can just download it anyway and if you can't get a licence you can't play. So what's the point?
But does it run in Wine?
Virus? What virus?
(That being said - no, I'm not going to pirate this game. I'll wait a year or two, then get the Battlechest with all three games for a third the price)
Full Price?
Bought for £31.42 from Tesco Entertainment (using the FTSL15-1 code), plus the Quidco cashback of £2.52 makes it significantly cheaper than buying a digital copy.
Why would you buy a digital version of a game when the boxed version of cheaper? And out of interest, how big is the digital download?
(Its a good game btw, I'm enjoying it immensely and never played the original)
I'd say....
if the sc/2 expansions are designed to split the community i will not be buying them.
that said I am extremely happy with this 'crap i'm' -supposedly(??)- due'. this is the first RTS since genz that's really bought a smile to my face.
I for one
quite like this game and believe its well worth the 34.99 i paid for it. Blizzard have polished this game to a very high standard which is something far from common in the pc game market these days with all the cross console ports and crap going on.
