You think the only way to acquire a working CD-key is to buy the game?  There are people who have hundreds of illicit but working CD-keys for various games.  You need some level of sophistication to do this, which is why for most games it's not worth your time.  Currently, the vast majority of the people who are acquiring CD-keys illigitimately are gold-farmers and botters who get banned regularly and need plenty of CD-keys to support their continued activities.  The last thing I want to see is mainstream gamers actually getting involved with that filth.

It will be cracked, and when it is it won't just be pirates who patronize this service, but otherwise legitimate players seeking LAN gaming.  Congratulations Blizzard, you've just brought the mainstream gamer and the pirate into the same fold.  This is the ultimate irony and idiocy of trying to combat piracy by taking away features from a legitimate user.

"Cracking" is really the wrong word. A normal "crack" is meant to remove something. Like a DRM scheme. The rest of the game is still running with the "cracked" part skipped over or stripped out.

Like if Blizzard actually has LAN play in the .exe and just disabled outside of special tournament builds, a crack could re-enable it. But if its not there at all, putting it in isn't a crack. It's either adding a whole new game mode, or (far more likely) emulating Battle.net and redirecting the game to it.

Both are totally doable, but a much more monumental effort then a crack. Most DRM is only even meant to work for a week or two to get initial sales free of pirates. If Blizzard gets 3 months before a fully functional bnetd 2 is out there, then it'd be hailed as a monumental success by industry standards.

I mean, I hate this decision quite a lot. But it's not going to be undone in a week like a DRM scheme.

(Funny thing is that the retail version of Demigod didn't have LAN either. The very first patch enabled it.)

While a monthly fee is a possibility, I think you'll find the truth about the 'lucrative cash cow' was already announced and written up last December 2008, when Activision (Blizzard) and Microsoft (Massive) did a press release for their in-game and exclusive advertising deal designed to run on Battle.net.  Oh, and it doesn't stop at ad placement.  Blizzard, after Activision botched the announcement and hinted of a possbility of advertising within the pay2play MMO WoW, stated that they'd not allow in-game ads.  But for the past weeks, I see a lot of folks signing on to the Mtn Dew site to get their in-game battle-bot pet.  Then sign on every day to get a pack of Mtn Dew "Game Fuel" to power the battle-bot.  So, even if you're not actively going through the web ad content to get your bot and fuel, you still get to see it all in game and say things like, Hey how do I get that cool battle-bot.  And other players tell you to go to the Mtn Dew site.  See? Blizzard didn't lie.  Massive didn't advertise in WoW.  But I digress...

Anyway, be sure to buy that Mtn Dew you saw while playing one of the 3 copies of SC2 you had to buy if you wanted all the content.  Cash cow?  I think they've found it.  LAN support?  Nah.  Not until they figure out how to feed ads to your private network.

oh, btw, in case it wasn't clear: Massive is a Microsoft subsidiary.  They're an ad placement firm, specializing (xclusively?) on in-game advertising.  "Massive: Put your brand in play"

I was just using the amount of cinematics as a means of showing the effort being put behind the single player, I'm not even a fan of rts single player games. I find it's not the greatest means of story telling.

It all comes down to "wait and see" basically. They said they have features up their sleeve to one up LAN so who knows.

I beleive that this whole no-lan thing is nonsense.  Two years ago at Gencon in Indianapolis, blizzard was there with StarCraft 2 and you were able to play a 2 on 2 game via LAN for 15 minutes as part as a demo.  That was two years ago that i did that, the game was so much fun my buddies and I kept getting back in line for more.  At that time the zerg werent available yet, but dear god it was so much fun as the protoss and terran.  Ive been a huge fan of blizzard games since warcraft I, the demo of SC2 i got to play has made me want to play it ever since, it is really addictingly fun!  So the fact that they had Lan then and not now is making me think that something is up since the recent merger with activision.

We NEVER had access to the internet at our LAN parties. Mostly because we choose a location that is isolated, so our noise won't annoy anyone. And we go to a LAN partie to play together, not to sit in the same room while playing. But may be i my scoial life is not messd up enough to understand that...

And who had the silly idea that the majority has a fast internet access? That is not even in the industry nations the case.

Leave your desk just for a few seconds and you will notice the world outside looks much grimmer than your pampered minds can imagine.

On the topic of LAN parties, I completely agree. We rarely, if ever, had a stable connection. We tended to have some kind of basic connection for the use of IM's and the like, but other than that.. nothing you could play a game on.

This somewhat ties into my loathing of how later Diablo II patches and Hellgate handled things. Play in a LAN or Offline, and you only get half the game, forcing you to play on their servers to get the full experience. But I guess that's another topic.

There will be mass suicide in South Korea.

Honestly though I'm not sure it's a bad thing.  There's been a number of ad-sponsored games in Asia and Blizz had initially considered launching WoW as one of them but decided against it because they thought it would disenfranchise American gamers...  At some point in time we as consumers need to come to terms with the fact that stuff just isn't free, and whether you use it or not the lifetime b.net ticket that comes in your SC2 box (if you buy it the old fashioned way or at all) has strings attached.

All internet industries (and no shortage of tradionally offline industries, like journalism) are evolving to remain or become profitable and ad revenue is a logical source of income.  You're not really picking a winning battle by opposing it.

You clearly know nothing.  Don't you know Bnet is flawless?  Just go to the DemiGod forums and you will see it posted all the time.

I dunno why people see that as a big deal, though. Diablo 1 and Starcraft both had ads in the battle.net lobby. Most of them were ads for other Blizzard stuff, but not all of them. Nobody really much cared.

I don't know... I think there's a lot of things that will arise from this that haven't been voiced yet:

What about the patch that comes out that makes balance changes which myself and my friends do not like?  If I was playing on a LAN we would have the choice to avoid that patch and play the game WE wanted to play.  Forcing us to connect to BNet to play will also force us to install said patch, would it not?

What about when the BNet servers are down due to scheduled maintenance or what-have-you?

I don't know.. I don't like this at all.  I play LAN almost exclusively; almost never online.  The reason is this: I suck at competitive play.  I am a casual gamer and the online world, in my opinion, gets very elitist with any given game very quickly.  Within a month of any given game's release I will lose an online game 99% of the time. And my frinds and I are neither sore losers or winners as we all win or lose a comparable amount.  Online, when I do win that 1 game out of 100, according to my opponent it MUST be a map hack and he disconnects from me.  When I lose, I'm a noob that has no business playing the game.  It's just no damn fun.