Does anyone think Starcraft's population would boost significantly if Blizzard ever released the game for free, or is it too old a game?

Does anyone think Blizzard would ever do this? They've done it for SC2, sort of, but as far as I know SCBW never went free to play.

The game only costs $15 (for both vanilla and BW), so making it free wouldn't change much. If people have never played SC1 before, they're probably more likely to go to SC2, especially since you can get a starter edition for free. Not to mention, I doubt Blizzard would advertise it much, so hardly anyone would even know that it went free.

tl;dr: no, this wouldn't change anything, The game's already cheap, so making it free wouldn't increase its popularity.

I think there's a big gap between free and cheap though. Just look at TF2. It was very cheap, yet it got a big population boost when it went free to play.

I've thought about this before and it would definitely get a boost in players. If it was free to play they could use the unused ad space at the top to support the servers.

$15 Is a lot to shell out for a game that's not even from this millennium when you can get more than one recently released game for the same price. Brood War has enough notoriety that it could attract a lot of players with a free to play announcement, though.

It would be cool if they added the classic games to the Blizzard app. That would also make it more visible.

Admittedly if they offered it for free I'd download it. Like lil said, $15 doesn't sound like a lot but it is way too much for a game that is that old. If they had some way to monetize it (with dlc or the likes) they'd probably be more willing to do it, but offering it for free on its own probably doesn't sound like a good enough deal.

Also, if they advertise it wrong I think it will come across as demeaning. Recently Origins offered "over $200 worth of games" on HumbleBundle...but they were all old games. So it came across as more of a dumb publicity stunt than an actual deal.

I would love it if they released many of their old games...like the original warcraft games...alongside sc as a bundle for $15. I'd be more willing to pay that.

Blizzard has been actively sabotaging and pulling support for Brood War since the release of SC2, so I'm not sure why you'd assume they'd do anything for the game now, especially since its proscene is starting back up again.

Let's dig that clone back up!

Nah, it wouldn't help popularity imo. At least not as the only measure. To find widespread acceptance it also needs proper support for current OSes and a united online platform where you can easily host and quickly find players for public games.

But that's pretty hypothetical as Blizzard wants to push SC2. I doubt they'll consider the publicity gained by releasing SC as freeware a big enough factor to benefit their 3rd installment of SC2. This is their only concern left: Milk the SC-Cow one last time.

It would only help so much, and probably for a limited time. Unless you're playing with friends, be prepared to run into script kiddies who will drop your lobbies, maphack, and otherwise ruin your games. If you're lucky enough to piss off the wrong script kiddie, then they might follow you around for weeks, flood your channels, flood the gamelist, etc. It would only work if Blizzard decided to do some massive patchwork on all of these exploits and security holes. Blizzard would have to clean up those things that would sour a newbie's experience very quickly. They would also want to extend support to modern operating systems, as Nude suggested. This is a bare minimum without doing more extensive bugfixes, adding new features for mappers, etc.

The shame of it is that there's a decent pool of programmers here who would give SCBW some updates and love, probably working for free, if they had the opportunity.