[HoneyBadger]

I'm just suggesting a solution to a problem that other people have posted about. If it's a hold-over and can be fixed with a few taps of the keyboard, then by all means.

People with Starcraft who don't also have Broodwar, still play Starcraft, and that's a 10 year old game, so obviously a "branch" as you call it (I'll be referring to it as an "expansion-pack" so as to not confuse this with other, more agricultural, issues.) isn't by itself an automatic game-killer. The big question here is how *many* people?

Ofcourse, I'll have to consult my psychic voodoo 8-ball, but I'm willing to bet the release of Broodwar didn't thrust Blizzard into bankruptsy like a plummeting meteor?

Same thing with patches-this isn't alien technology we're talking about, nobody is sitting in a secret laboratory in Nevada, trying to decypher the complexities of a patch system for games with expansion-packs. The most common process is to, yes, have two separate patches, when a single patch would affect two different versions of a game, adversely.

Finally, Stardock did a fine job of serial number authentication. Hell, *I* could probably write a working, secure-if extremely archaic-serial number authentication program in BASIC, from memory. Not that it's all *that* necessary.

Yes, piracy is upsetting and immoral, but it's a problem that throws people into a panic of somewhat greater proportion-for a great deal less reason-than Communism in the McCarthy era. I personally sought out Dominions based on a half-remembered photograph in, possibly? Dragon Magazine. I not only bought my copy of the game, but I also ended up purchasing a copy of Disciples 2 (another game with like 4 expansion packs), because I thought it *was* Dominions. Spending money on advertizement is way more important than any money thrown away on halting piracy, for a game like Dominions.

And if you don't believe me about the viability of expansion-packs, ask the creators of the Sims.