Want an early look at Starcraft II, widely expected to be one of the year’s hottest PC games? You can — but it’s going to cost you.

Considered by many to be the best real-time strategy game ever made, Starcraft has racked up nearly 10 million sales since its 1998 debut. It’s a stalwart of the professional gaming scene at home and abroad — and especially in South Korea, where televised Starcraft tournaments continue to attract millions of viewers, and the game’s still something of a national obsession.

Analysts expect its sequel, Starcraft II, to sell as many as 8 million copies when it’s released later this year — but a select, invite-only group of fans are getting to test out the game early, aiming to help its developer Blizzard squash bugs and address gameplay problems.

Access codes to the “beta test” were handed out for free, with many thought to have come from giveaways at a 2008 fan festival organized by the game’s developer, Blizzard. But a few enterprising fans promptly put theirs up for sale on auction sites like eBay — and the going rate is as much as $400.

Impressed? It’s certainly a high price for a few months’ play. Typically, beta accounts stop working shortly before the game’s release, and testers need to purchase the game just like everyone else, if they’re not already sick of it. It’s also of questionable legality — it’s not clear whether recipients of the keycodes actually “own” them — and Blizzard would be entirely within its rights to cancel any beta accounts it deems to have been acquired in ways it considers inappropriate.

All that said, the prices are far from a record for Blizzard. Beta keys for the most recent expansion to its hit online game World of Warcraft were changing hands for over $1000 in 2008.

Source: http://videogames.yahoo.com/