During a GDC Panel Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design at Blizzard Entertainment, has revealed that Blizzard plans to license its Battle.net platform to third-parties, but only after taking care of itself first.
”It’s something that we’ve definitely always talked about,” said Pardo. ”The problem for us is that it takes a lot of work from our other teams. Every time we have the discussion, we try to figure out what’s going to happen if let’s say a Blizzard game was coming out and a third party game was coming out at the same time. Could we be agnostic in that way? Could we offer the same level of support that we offer our games to third parties? We just never know. It just seems like a big job for us.”
Pardo then mentioned that they are testing out a system with the StarCraft 2 Map Marketplace: ”I think that will be a really good test-bed for us to see how much support we have to give to mapmakers and how well we can do something like that.”
Would you be pleased to see third-parties using Battle.net?
