I found a way to solicit donations and monetize Ant War using skins, despite the hurdles imposed by the limitations of Starcraft 2’s Battle Net. Basically, since games for SC2’s arcade exist entirely within the custom game arcade launcher, there’s no way to monetize the game through micro-transactions, payment buttons, or communicate with any server outside of Blizzard’s.

According to Blizzard’s Custom Game Acceptable Use Policy, developers are allowed to solicit donations or receive money for the game so long as we don’t make the games pay to win or give any sort of additional access or advantage to the purchasing player.

Therefore players are able to get skins in 2 ways.

First they can earn unlockable skins. These skins can not be purchased. The primal and cerberus skin sets fall under this category. Skins are unlocked by fulfilling achievements.

Second, they can donate. Players who donate $5 or more will get access to 20 skins(!). Players who donate $100 or more will get access to 2 additional skins, the Starcraft 1 Hydralisk and Ultralisk [small in-game variant]. Players who donate $250 or more get access to all of that plus the Starcraft 1 Zergling and Ultralisk [large variant].

I’ve been fortunate to have received over $1500 USD in total donations from loyal fans of the game. I’m very grateful for their support!

Yet it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the development time for Ant War, which took 4 years of free time. If any new developers asked me if they should make their first game using the Starcraft 2 engine, I would advise against it. Starcraft 2’s arcade has a limited reach and Blizzard’s environment imposes limitations that make it difficult to scale an audience.

Make a game in an engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal instead, publish on Steam, and potentially get a really large audience! Even if it fails, you’ve gained the experience using a better engine, publishing to Steam, and marketing a stand alone game.

Players can earn skins, as seen below. Note the requirement visible on the skin selection screen and on the related achievement. The achievement shows the skin that can be unlocked when the player hovers over the lock icon in the top right.

The selected skin, locked or unlocked, shows up as a 3D model in the top left view port. Players can zoom in and out and change the player color of the skin as it rotates.