Battle.net is going away.
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Now it seems like that may not be the only Diablo game releasing this year, as a Diablo2HD website has just launched, complete with a 45 day countdown.
Battle.net originally debuted way back in 1996 alongside the original Diablo, and since then has been used to power iconic games like Starcraft, World of Warcraft, and more recent titles like Hearthstone and Overwatch. As such, they based the name off of a website naming convention in order to easily relay to users what the service was about.
“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”, reads the aforementioned announcement.
Why the company would choose to forgo decades of an instantly recognizable and iconic name still isn’t clear to me, and I’m actually concerned about this move-ever since Blizzard moved from the awesome Battle.net servers that powered Diablo 2, Starcraft and Warcraft to the frightful lobby-less “Bnet 2.0” system, I understood how Activision’s meddling would affect the future of Blizzard.
There won’t be a new name for Blizzard’s platform, the company says-they’re just going to refer to it as “Blizzard tech”. 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 tech” is described in the post as a catch-all term for various interconnected services, including “Blizzard Streaming”, which now lets players tie their Blizzard credentials to a Facebook account to stream live gameplay on their Facebook accounts, and “Blizzard Voice”, a cross-game VOIP system that still only exists in an alpha state.
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There is no word yet on when exactly the company plans to stop using the Battle.net name entirely.
