Pardo: Blizzard may licence out Battle.net

Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo has told The Escapist that while Battle.net will remain with the company for the foreseeable future, he doesn't rule out licencing it out to third-parties.

Speaking at GDC, Pardo said:

"It's something that we've definitely always talked about. 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 also revealed Blizzard was testing out a sort of map marketplace for Starcraft II.

"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," he said.

The new version of Battle.net will be released alongside the release of Starcraft II, which is due for the first half of this year.