Hell, it's about time! The worldwide launch of Starcraft II is underway with stores doing midnight openings around the globe as the date becomes 27th in each time zone - it is good to live in New Zealand today! In related news, the general productivity in South Korea is bound to plummet with a sudden, mysterious epidemic keeping people from showing up work and it remains to be seen if Blizzard's networking infrastructure will survive the onslaught as people pile in on the new Battle.Net service.
The official Starcraft II Facebook page has a large pile of photos from midnight launches around the globe, with developers signing copies at select locations. Expect more photos and video to become available as the US launch events begin in a few hours. This is how you do a global game launch - game publishers everywhere, take notice - none of the usual "oh, US will get their version three days in advance" crap here.
Digital download copies have already been available for preload for a while - the European digital do215cwnload version is available here while US version is here. There is just one catch - the downloadable version will go on sale in Europe at 10:00 CEST while US gamers have to wait until 10:00 AM PDT for the North American digital download store to open before it is possible to buy the download version - if you can't wait that long or if you want a Collector's Edition, you must venture outside for a boxed copy.
While the multiplayer mode of Starcraft II has been widely dissected and analyzed to death during the long beta process, the single player campaign has been kept under wraps. As everything with Starcraft II is tied to the new Battle.Net service, there has been no access to advance copies for reviewers - everyone is getting to play the single player game on the same day.
Now if you excuse me, my SC2 installation is complete, so I have some urgent work I must attend to...
21.3 million digital games sold in 2009
