In the months leading up to BlizzCon, it was tough to gauge the level of Blizzard's ambition in regard to the new Battle.net. During interviews, the developers mostly mumbled about matchmaking, leagues and other features, but were always quick to note that everything was still up in the air.

But following the official unveiling of the Battle.net feature list, Blizzard isn't mumbling anymore. On top of the Real ID system and other Xbox Live-esque features, the new Battle.net will also see Blizzard experimenting in radical areas of online service. A prime example is the post-launch StarCraft II Marketplace, which--in addition to supporting the upload of free maps--will allow users to sell high-quality maps and mods, a monetary incentive largely untested in the industry.

The man behind Blizzard's big online push is Greg Canessa, former head of Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade division. During an interview with Shacknews this weekend, Canessa touched on topics such as the marketplace, console potential, LAN play, and whether we might see games other than Blizzard's on Battle.net in the future.

Shack: I was talking to you guys around two months ago, and nobody knew exactly what Battle.net was going to be. Now it's this huge thing. What's that process been like?

Greg Canessa: It's been great, and you know, we actually had a sense back then, we just weren't quite ready to talk about. We wanted to give it a little more time to percolate internally. As you know, Blizzard is pretty careful about making sure we don't over-promise. We wanted to make sure that the design was in great shape, that the product was in some form of production, and we really had our ducks in a row before we decided to talk to you guys about it. It's super cool being here at BlizzCon being able to talk to you guys, because it is a big project to keep under wraps. You look at the extensiveness of the game service, and the ambition of the project, it's pretty..

Shack: ..pretty surprising. Right down to the priced community maps. Is that something you guys have been wanting to do for a long time?

Greg Canessa: It's something we've had in development for a little while. It really predates even the new Battle.net vision, if you go back to some of the success that the company's had with WarCraft III. The mod community was huge. It was a huge part of the success of WarCraft III. [Defense of the Ancients] and other mods have been the reason why that game is still popular today.

And if you look beyond our games, you look to Day of Defeat or Counter-Strike, these user-created mods, they've done huge things toward extended the shelf-life of a multiplayer game's franchise. And that's something we aspire to do, and continue to do. StarCraft 1 has had a 12-year lifespan because it's a really successful, popular title, particularly in Asia. Those are the types of franchises that Blizzard is in the business of making.

And so mods have always been part of the culture, and has been part of the design of Battle.net from the ground up. Not only some of the stuff that we were talking about with the Marketplace, but also you look at things like our custom game and join game interfaces, our matchmaking system, our leagues and ladders architecture--there are a number of areas where we've built them specifically around being extensible and accommodating new types of games that haven't even been invented yet. We've built the system to accommodate those types of things without having to redo Battle.net.

Shack: Is there a chance you'll look at selling and supporting the games of other publishers on Battle.net in the future?

Greg Canessa: Yeah, I'm getting this question a lot. [laughs] I can tell you that we don't have any specific plans to talk about today, but it's our first step. Obviously Blizzard is all about the game, and we're focused on quality and a world-class experience. This is a very ambitious project; as you can see it's a very complex service we're providing, and our goal is to make sure StarCraft II is a world-class experience. And so that's our focus right now.

Then of course we're building this system, this online games service, to serve all Blizzard games going forward. So you look at Diablo III, there will obviously be a very deep, integrated experience there. And then you look at World of Warcraft, and some of the things we're doing just even at the ship of StarCraft II to integrate with World of Warcraft, facilitating cross-game chat, cross-realm chat, friends list--those are examples of the type of things we're doing and going forward. That's a lot of work.

And so, future titles--who knows. I can tell you that one of the things we're proud of and excited about with the new Battle.net is the fact that, since we are focused and have a small number of titles, we're not constrained by the need to be a platform, in the same way that Xbox Live and Steam and PlayStation Network need to be a platform, and need to provide that lowest common denominator set of features that all games can plug into despite what genre they are. We're not bound by that constraint at Blizzard; we can build deeply integrated, super-cool scenarios for our games.

The decals stuff is an example, that's a StarCraft II-specific feature. The leagues and ladders stuff is a StarCraft II-specific feature. We can afford to do those types of things that are deeply integrated, that nobody's been able to do with these generic platforms, because it's too much work. They can't support hundreds of games and do that level of integration. So that's really a competetive advantage.

Shack: At the same time, everyone always asks about Blizzard doing a console game. Are you planning for that possibility? Because obviously at that point, you're on the 360 or something like that, and you're on Xbox Live already, so you'd almost have to do something like what EA does, with its account system.

Greg Canessa: Well, I can tell you, we are building, we're building the--I'll put it this way: that's a hard question to answer. The Battle.net service is being built specifically around the PC, and specifically around our games. What we do in the future, I obviously don't have anything to talk about with regard to Blizzard porting consoles or not in the future. I can tell you that philosophically, the company is interested in consoles. Many of us are console gamers. We all have Xbox Live gamertags, and we all play Xbox at home, and so we love Xbox. And we love Sony and other platforms as well. We have a great deal of respect for them.

Philosophically, the company is interested in--you know, we feel like if we would ever want to go into the console, we'd want to know that from the get-go when we're developing a game, and not spend a lot of time retroing games that aren't designed for consoles. So I think it's more of a go-forward thing if we were ever able to do it. And with regards to Battle.net, it is very much built around those awesome integrated gaming scenarios for our specific games, so if we were to ever do anything on the console, we would want to make sure that those scenarios carried across to the console. How that would work, the details, I have no idea. Couldn't tell you today. [pause] I actually do have an idea, but I can't talk about it. [laughs]

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