Way back in 2009, Blizzard announced that StarCraft II would include a map marketplace with options to buy and sell custom maps. Years later, the StarCraft II team is finally following through.
StarCraft II‘s arcade, which allows players to create and play custom maps at no extra charge, will add premium fan-made maps alongside the game’s next big patch, version 4.3.
In a lot of ways, the feature sounds similar to Bethesda’s Creation Club: Blizzard is handpicking specific “prominent community creators” and working alongside them to create new maps and modes, and “a share of the sales” will go directly to creators. In a blog post announcing all of this, Blizzard said it’s been applying its steady hand to the first batch of premium maps “over the last year.”
For now, this program has resulted in two maps: “ARK Star” from creator Pirate and “Direct Strike” from Tya. The former is a turn-based RPG focused on the Protoss while the latter is an upgrade of popular tug-of-war mod “Desert Strike HotS.”
Both will cost $US4.99 ($7), but in Direct Strike’s case, there’ll be free and premium versions. Premium includes four new modes as well as special cosmetics.
StarCraft II‘s 4.3 patch doesn’t have a release date yet, but hopefully it will arrive in fewer than nine years.
Comments
4 responses to “StarCraft 2 Gets Paid Custom Maps”
Ah paid mods.
Queue blizzard apologists talking about how this isn’t paid mods.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted when it is exactly that, paid mods.
Maybe were trying to find what the problem is that suddenly makes us apologists. What are we apologising for?
I downvoted him because blizzard had made clear that there would be community made paid content (Paid mods) being impletmented into SC2 for a while. They did not just badly shove it in one day without any prior warning.
The larger community of SC2 is fine with this change because blizzard handeled it well and informed the community greatly on how it would work.
Thats not being an apologist. That just having common sense and not being ignorant like the comments above.
Seems good. Map Makers are undervalued and can generate a lot of attraction and income to the games. Good to see them finally get some attention.
I think they will go with cosmetics instead of paywalls which would be far better. It will result in a larger player-base which results in better value in the long term.