Yes, you read right. Battle.net, source of infinite gamer joy, may cease to be what gave us a reason to us it: A free place to play great games with people all over the world.

Now, myself, I’ll never forget the sleepless nights spent leveling in the deepest depths of Diablo II, or getting overrun by some Korean kid’s twenty carriers before I had a single Barracks in Starcraft. That will possibly all change in the near future according to Blizzard’s Jay Wilson, who spoke at a Diablo III panel a few days ago. “We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features,” Wilson announced, then continued: “We kind of have to.”

Nuh-uh. Not good enough. They’re telling us, with five year old or more games still flying off the shelves, (Starcraft STILL has strong sales) and the incomprehensible amount of revenue generated through WoW, they can’t keep Battle.net free? I call bullshit.

In Blizzard’s defense, however, I don’t think they are directly responsible for this move. With the Activision-Blizzard merger, all sorts of weird, non-sensical things have been happening. Starcraft II is now slated as a trilogy, (WTF?) and I have a feeling Activision is big in pushing these greedy techniques. After all, Wilson continued to say that Blizzard itself does not have a strong desire to make it a paid service.

So what will happen? Only time will tell… But it will be a side day for both human and robot gamers if this actually happens.

R.I.P.