Dec 10, 2010 20:11 GMT  ·  By

A leak of important launch milestones from the Chinese division of Blizzard suggests that the company is set to further expand its Battle.net service, aiming to allow third parties to sell their titles on it at some point in early 2012, after introducing a Map Market, presumably aimed at Starcraft 2 gamers, during next year, probably in conjunction to the launch of the Heart of the Swarm expansion.

The information comes from a package of info linked to Blizzard that came out of its Chinese division.

The authenticity of the data is somewhat confirmed by the fact that the scandal has lead to the firing of the general manager, Ye Weilun, and to a reorganization of the division.

Battle.net has been relaunched in July this year, alongside the launch of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, and Blizzard has already said that it had plans for further expansion of the services it will offer.

It would make sense for Blizzard to use it to actually sell downloadable copies of its own titles, complementing physical retail for the likes of World of Warcraft or for the upcoming Diablo III and Heart of the Swarm.

The next logical step would be for Battle.net to digitally distribute titles from the Activision side of the business, allowing the publisher more tight control of the multiplayer offered and severing its links to Steam, which is owned by Valve.

But it's not clear what Activision Blizzard and Battle.net would gain by adding actual third party games to the service and directly competing with Steam.

The move would mean more resources dedicated to Battle.net in the long term and a constant expansion of the services it offers, maybe even something akin to the Steamworks suite from Valve.

Blizzard has not commented on the information coming from the leak, including the fact that it is developing previously unknown project Titan and Phoenix.