http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.389053-Starcraft-2-Multiplayer-May-Become-Free-To-Play

I can see it now:

You have to pay real-life money to build bases and spawn units ;)

One full race, the tutorials, 3-5 single player missions and 3-6 multiplayer maps are already free. :p

So in a way, it already is free-to-play, with the rest of the game purchasable.

EDIT: Another thing to add, they will be adding the ability for mod makers to sell their mods through The Arcade soon, so I guess that's another revenue stream. Though, honestly, I don't see the game going free-to-play soon, maybe a year or two after Legacy of the Void is released (which equals three-four years from now).

EDIT: Same goes for D3 and WoW, more or less.

I don't care.

I would rather have the opposite, singleplayer free-to-play and multiplayer prohibitivly expensive payware with pricey microtransactions..... yeah that will be a good way to liberate some dollars from the CS-pwndyou-generation!

I do have to wonder how Blizzard managed to make tons of money and keep releasing new content for Starcraft, Diablo 1+2 and Warcraft 1-3, even if they didn't have any "plans on how to monetize it".
Could i be ... that those games were just so awesome that people payed 20-30$ even 10 years after the release?
...
Nah, must've been magic.

Good old fashioned corporate greed. That's all it is. Not like I care much, anyway. To me Blizzard has lost its touch after Warcraft 3.

So, being successful equals greed?

Getting paid for work does. Most of the people here do their part for free and use photosynthesis for energy, like any decent being.

Haha, me too! Anything to get games about a good single playing experience rather than a social, pissing contest.

Hmm, I see, so it's not enough to rape the franchise, they need to piss on it and set it alight.

Blizzard used to be so awesome, now they're creating the same sort of crap that the competitors used to play and refusing to sell the older games.

So the only way to get Diablo 1 is to pirated it or get it in retail?

AFAIK you can buy D2 from Blizzard, but the original is no longer in the battlechest and you can only buy it second hand. I still have my copy, along with Hellfire. But, Anything that old or older from Blizzard gets basically no acknowledgement from Blizzard.

At this point, you might as well just pirated it, the only acknowledgement you're likely to get that the game exists is if they file suit against a pirate.

But in reality, I'd look for it at a second hand shop, they're presumably pretty cheap at this point.

Problem, it cannot play on Windows 7, unless there are unofficial patchs I can get from?

Damn it then as I said, there has to be some sort of unofficial patch like the durante mod for Dark Souls.

Up next after, WoW. I'm surprised they don't do that already. They have a f2p edition that caps out at 20 with a bunch of restrictions on it. They said recently they want more people in old zones, and added Wrath to the basic wow license. If they gave a f2p to 80 option that would get new people into the game and have the older zones filled up again while reserving newer content for subscribers.

I'd imagine things like twinking and people raiding older stuff keeps them from doing it. Even on the limited starter edition there are people that try to max the chars as much as possible and just do battlegrounds afterwards.