New screenshots of BNET2 have been revealed at the 2009 Blizzcon held in Anaheim California: You can check them out here.

But more impressive has been Blizzard's executive vice president's revelation that their upcoming and most anticipated RTS, Starcraft 2, will allow custom map developers to sell their maps using their online services. Not enough details have been unveiled yet, but it seems that Blizzard doesn't want to miss an opportunity to make more profit. As you may know, big custom map developers' communities have been formed over the years around other Blizzard titles Starcraft and Warcraft 3. More info here.

Source: Kotaku

The ability to SELL their maps? Wow. Didn't see that coming.

sounds pretty stupid

how do they plan on preventing people from making free copies exactly?

so are they selling thier maps to blizzard?? so basically blizzard controls maps like dota or whatever and they can cash out on their popularity.

GoDz wrote:so are they selling thier maps to blizzard?? so basically blizzard controls maps like dota or whatever and they can cash out on their popularity.

Thats not how I interpreted it. IIRC Blizzard owns the content that is created by map editors already. Say I make a map that happens to be super-emo ball town stizzie and people love it. Its popular enough to become a so-called premium map. I can then sell my map to the general public and Blizzard would get a big slice of it, probably a huge percentage.

lol thats gonna be so gay

I wonder how this is going to work... Map 'protection' for WC3 maps has been a standard for quite a while, and it has proved useful for developers who want to keep their own community, and soon it let them have some monetary profit. I can only see this system working if it came in par with an out of the box map protection, as in, a way to distribute closed-source maps without obliging people to pay fees for them. What if Blizzard made it so all closed-source maps would have to be sold? Who knows if protection is going to be enforced? Back in the day where most popular maps weren't protected, people would learn from other people's maps by looking at the code and the tricks they used. There are plenty of undocumented WorldEditor tricks newbies won't know about even if they look at the most popular map development forums. While there is documentation available to learn the WorldEditor map skills on your own, it usually requires previous knowledge of other stuff. Some people have gotten into development itself thanks to the WorldEditor. Is this new system going to encourage new developers?