The revamp of Battle.net has promised to be a free service for Blizzard users, and that isn’t changing. Value added services on the other hand might creep in more.
They’re all about providing ”amazing value”, so they ”may add some stuff” to Marketplace but whatever it could be it ”won’t interfere” with the free content. No Xbox Live-like subscriptions.
”I’m not going to rule anything out,” Greg Canessa, Battle.net’s project director told 1UP.
”But Blizzard’s reputation is about providing an amazing value – an amazing amount of stuff for free. And then enabling additional stuff, like value-add services, to maintain the free level. Okay, you pay for StarCraft 2, and Battle.net is free.”
”All the stuff we’re talking about: the Achievements, the profiles, the Avatars, the unlockables, the leagues; it’s all included for free,” he stated.
”Then there’s value-added services – like for WOW where you have a paid subscription with tons of stuff, and we then added paid character transfer services on top of that later. So we may add some stuff to Marketplace, but it won’t interfere with the free tier.”
Blizzard have announced that StarCraft II will support both free and premium maps for the community, as the studio hopes to coax in developers to build mega maps, charging what they want. Are you looking forward to the new Battle.net, videogamer?