April 13th, 2010 
Cliff Riseborough 
Blizzard has previously said they would make Starcraft II pricing decisions on a regional basis. Apparently, Russian gamers are big fans of paying in regular instalments, because they’ll have to to play the game online.
The base game will cost less than in other regions. However, the multiplayer out of the box will be time limited, and playing with other European based gamers will be blocked. The DVD will come with a year of multiplayer access to other Russian gamers only, while the jewel case version will have the limited multiplayer for only 120 days.
Beyond that, a monthly fee will have to be paid to maintain multiplayer access, and extend it beyond the borders of Russia itself. Or, you can pay more than you did for the game to ‘upgrade’ it to allow permanent multiplayer.
Will this be used in other markets? Maybe, maybe not. What it does prove is that the new Battle.net client is clearly set up to allow monthly payments for game play beyond just World of Warcraft.
As for how the average Russian gamer probably feels about this, one can guess…
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