Battle.Net StarCraft2 allows Mods to be sold. Thread

There are a lot of misconceptions about just what the Bnet marketplace means, and how it'll affect gamers.

Many people read the news, and immediately go "wait, Blizzard is taking advantage of mappers! we'll now have to pay money for even fan maps!" and view it only as if they took the entire WC3 library of fan mods/maps and attached price tags.

Blizzard has stated that only mods with a lot of original content (ie art) are what they have in mind for the marketplace, specifically name dropping Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. They also said that a mod like Dota wouldn't be suited for marketplace, since it reuses WC3 assets. With this in mind, I can't think of a single released WC3 map/mod which would even be on the marketplace.

Now again, lets look at who is running the bnet team...its the same guy who created Xbox Live Arcade.

What Blizzard is doing is essentially making the RTS equivalent of Quake 3/UE3, and pairing it with a required publishing deal (anything done on their SC2 engine, has to be sold via the marketplace). For RTS fans and modders this is really amazing news. In an ideal situation, you'll see the marketplace filled with custom campaigns, total conversions, maps with new tilesets, and novelty maps/mods...all of a quality you wouldn't see otherwise.

Of course, this all depends on the economics of it (just how viable people are to pay money for this, and how much of a cut Activision will take).

And just how much these premium maps/mods are going to cost. :]
But I'm glad there are people that don't see Blizzard as leeches. I might be slowly becoming a fanboy, but damn there's a lot of haters who most of the time have no idea what they're talking about. The facts are there for everyone to see. Not accusing anyone in this topic of course. It's a rather intelligent conversation (thank God!).
But still, till we see what Blizz will actually do with their idea it's all assumptions and theories.

Kinda funny how Modern Warfare 2 (a sequel to CoD4, which has only 10 listed mods here) gets a frontpage news post on its possible ditching of mod support....when this Starcraft 2 news still hasn't had any attention from the moddb crew. What happened to them getting an RTS guy on staff?

It's probably not getting a lot of attention, because it's not something a lot of people are comfortable with promoting.