Blizzard doing away with the Battle.net name
End of an era.
Blizzard has announced it will soon do away with the Battle.net name for its gaming platform.
Battle.net launched in 1996 alongside the first Diablo game and quickly caught on. Nowadays, people use it to launch everything from Overwatch to World of Warcraft.
Effectively, nothing will change for players. The platform will work as before, just without the Battle.net name.
Instead, Blizzard will refer to its products and services using the Blizzard name instead. It's already started doing this, with things like Blizzard Streaming and Blizzard Voice.
"When we created Battle.net, the idea of including a tailored online-gaming service together with your game was more of 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," Blizzard said.
"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.
"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."
Blizzard said it will move forward with the change over the next several months. End of an era!