14 DAY TRIAL // The project director for the Battle.net service has suggested that, at some point in the future, the infrastructure will accommodate other Activision published titles, like the Call of Duty franchise, although at the moment the service is only linked to Blizzard made video game.
Greg Canessa has said that the experience that Blizzard has in online gaming communities, service delivery and infrastructure was a factor when Activision and Blizzard decided on their merger.
Canessa told Gamasustra that “I'll tell you this, Bobby Kotick and all the folks at Activision are very supportive of Battle.net and what we're doing.”
It would be interesting to see how titles like Call of Duty or Guitar Hero could be integrated into Battle.net but it seems that this common future is still some years away.
At the moment Canessa says the team at Battle.net is focused on near future challenges, saying “I go back to what Mike Morhaime said at last year's Blizzcon - it's all about focus. We have so many things going on right now. We have this vibrant World of Warcraft business, the StarCraft II business and eSports, we've got Diablo III and what's going on there, that's going to be a huge phenomenon for us.”
One of the most interesting additions to Battle.net will be the Starcraft 2 Marketplace, which will allow modders working with the game to upload their creations, with players able to search, download, comment and rate the content.
Content creators would also have the options to set a price for their products, with all revenue shared with Blizzard.
It seems that there are more than 50,000 user made mods for the Starcraft 2 at the moment and the number is expected to rapidly increase.
At the BlizzCon event the company has also shown mods created by the actual developers, saying that they would be delivered for free to all those who downloaded the real time strategy title.