Blizzard Marketplace Now Called Arcade, Has New Business Model

Video game developer Blizzard has announced that the old Marketplace initiative will now be known as the Blizzard Arcade and will allow creative players who know their way around game editors to make money by selling fellow players their new content.

The announcement was made at Blizzcon and the developers are saying that more custom games will be played through Arcade in the coming months, with Blizzard stating, “Allowing custom game makers to charge for their games will incentivize higher quality custom games, benefiting players and game creators.”

The Arcade relaunch will make it easier for players to find the best mods, with a number of ways to rate games and search the service using popularity and other parameters.

Blizzard is even creating a special “Fun or Not” queue which will allow players to line up in order to test the more obscure or new mods in order for the rest of the community to have a base line for their evaluation.

Arcade will likely launch just before the Heart of the Swarm expansion for Starcraft II and will support both editions of the game, with the mod tools set to also be expanded by Blizzard so that more complex new content can be created.

Initially Blizzard said that the Marketplace would arrive at the same time as Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty but the developers concentrated on making the multiplayer infrastructure solid and failed to launch the mod sharing service.

Blizzard has not yet clarified how mod creators will be able to get the money that they make through their content and its not yet clear whether the Starcraft II player base is ready to pay for mods that they have gotten for free until now.

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm should be launched at some point during the summer of 2012.