Blizzard may license Battle.net .

Blizzard's Rob Pardo has said the company could make its upcoming Battle.Net publishing and multiplayer platform available to third parties.

"It's something that we've definitely always talked about," Pardo said. "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."

Last year, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford offered up criticism for Valve's distribution platform, Steam, around the same question of remaining "agnostic" to game releases.

"There's so much conflict of interest there that it's horrid. It's actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win," Pitchford said.