The renowned American video game developer and producer of games such as Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft, Blizzard entertainment, is making changes towards a better future and we should all be excited about it.
Blizzard’s Battle.net service has been around for nearly two decades, giving players the opportunity to quickly start their favorite games and communicate with other players, but all good things must come to an end. Though Blizzard isn’t abandoning the technology, the “Battle.net” name is getting phased out.
When we created Battle.net, the idea of including a tailored online-gaming service together with your game was more a novel concept, so we put a lot of focus on explaining what the service was and how it worked, including giving it a distinct name. Over time, though, we’ve seen that there’s been occasional confusion and inefficiencies related to having two separate identities under which everything falls — Blizzard and Battle.net
The decision to drop Battle.net is a marketing strategy to better align its services. The name Battle.net has been attached to Blizzard for a long time; which gives a distinct implication to gamers that Blizzard has the best games for network games or LAN games.
In place of the Battle.net name, different services will instead be branded with “Blizzard.” The announcement points out that this has already been done with the both “Blizzard Streaming” and “Blizzard Voice,” and that other services will adopt similar names in the future.
Given that built-in multiplayer support is a well-understood concept and more of a normal expectation these days, there isn’t as much of a need to maintain a separate identity for what is essentially our networking technology
There are mixed reactions when they’ve changed or dropped Battle.net. Some of the gamers are still confused as to whether or not Blizzard was the developer or Battle.net.
