Blizzard Giving Free StarCraft II For South Koreans

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Recently at a StarCraft II event in South Korea, Blizzard (the developers behind StarCraft and World of Warcraft) announced that everybody in South Korea with an active WoW account will receive a complimentary copy of StarCraft II when it’s released. Wish you lived in South Korea yet?

1998′s StarCraft is pretty popular in South Korea. They have professional gaming leagues and television shows dedicated to the pro play of the game. Case in point, earlier this year, the country was ‘rocked’ by an inside gambling scandal that invovled some of the “sport’s” biggest names.

One reason that pundits believe that StarCraft is so popular in South Korea is that the game has aged and doesn’t have high hardware requirements. Also, Blizzard’s WoW giveaway is a bit of a cop out. While World of Warcraft is the most popular MMO game in the world (just over 11 million active users), it isn’t as popular in South Korea as it is in other regions.

Further information has come out regarding StarCraft II’s pricing in South Korea too. It’s a pretty unique pricing scheme. You can pay ₩69,000 ($57) for the whole game, or just ₩9,900 ($8) for a 30-day license. If that’s still too much, you can pay ₩2,000 ($1.65) for a 24-hour license. We know that game developers have wanted to push this “software as a service” idea for a while. Let’s see how it does.