I agree it’s unlikely for them to release old patches, but I didn’t mean free copies of the whole game (although they did make classic Starcraft free to play). I mean the patchers that patch the game you have. They should already have them up to 1.27b, so they’d just have to put those up and make patchers for 1.28 - 1.31.1. But another way to do it would be to offer the full game versions only to people who registered a CD key.
I don’t know if any maps require 1.31 but I wasn’t saying that any do. I personally am not saying that 1.31 is the best. I’m fine with 1.27 for single player and think it’s less buggy than any future legacy patch. But some people may want 1.31 for anything it may have over past versions: 1.31.0 Patch Notes and 1.31.1 Patch Notes or simply because it’s the latest legacy version. Probably not many people benefit from this, but notably if you bought RoC but not TFT, you get TFT for free in 1.31. Although battle.net was disabled for RoC in 1.31, so I wonder if a custom battle.net server for RoC in 1.31 is even feasible.
I think a game selling a few or several million (under 10 million) could still be considered popular, at least for some consoles. But why does it matter if a game is popular or from one of the top few companies for this? That doesn’t mean that everything about the game is ideal. Likewise some niche games may actually have good features that popular games could use. If a game can sell 1-2 million or even less and still make profit, what’s wrong with that? It’d just be even more successful if it sold more.
The 2002 EULA has been superseded a few times since then. The current EULA, which applies to the “Platform” which includes all games, went into effect in 2018.
The language of the 2002 EULA was relevant to a time when all media was physical, thus copying was a concern. The 2018 EULA, however, applies to a time when Bliz’s media is digital, which is essentially unlimited copies. As such, there’s no language that pertains to backups of the games in the modern EULA.