Actually, they're trying to get consoles on a larger development cycle. The Xbox 360 came out in 2005 and they're not expecting to replace it until 2014-2015. The PS2 has already experienced a 9 year life and its still selling strong.

Now we can have penis jokes on every web page!

On principle I've started surfing without adblock. I'd rather boycott websites with annoying ads than block legitimate websites with unobtrusive ads from making money.

Seriously. I think that although it could have been done *better*, this has been a fantastic marketing scheme. And to be honest, I don't really care if the Christian bloggers are freaking out, they're overreacting.

First, I don't believe it is against the law. (Bribes in goods/monetary exchanges/contracts are, I just think that reviews fall into the grey area.) Second, the "bribe" made no request or attempt at being designed to influence the reviews. Its a publicity stunt, not really a bribe because they didn't ask for anything in return.

You're right, all it would have to do is block some piracy. But it doesn't. EA Games finally stepped away from their DRM-heavy approach after they realized that the more they tried to push DRM, the higher rates of piracy they experienced.

I really wouldn't say you're in the minority because you met you friends IRL... The only reason I even got into MMOs is because my family members played, and since then I've tried to stick to games my friends play as well. Its more common in my experience to find people who play WoW because their friends play than who chose to play in and of themselves.

While they may fall behind that mask, in an interview Blizzard stated that piracy was the major factor behind the decision: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Blizzard-Responds-to-Fans-039-Request-for-LAN-Support-in-StarCraft-II-115627.shtml

As a company with a history of working hard to please its customers (the return of Raynor's original voice actor being a great example), are you paying attention to the petition to bring back LAN support at http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html? I ask because the petition brings forth a number of valid points, chief among them the fact that pirate battle.net servers will be created no matter what precautions you take. This is a point that has been proven time and time again by other companies seeking to use DRM. Take Spore for example: Spore arguably had the most powerful and restrictive DRM available and was intended to be "un-pirateable", yet it went down as the most largely pirated game in history and the pirated version was even available before the game had officially been released.