Blizzard’s Forgotten Vision: Uncovering the 24-Year-Old Plan for a Steam Rival

It is a well-known fact that in this era buying games online via download is a popular thing. And one of the pioneers was Steam, Valve’s online game store that was successful and made the company a lot of money. Because in addition to having many famous games Every month there are also promotions to reduce prices until game fans are almost bankrupt.

But who would believe that 24 years ago, in 2000, Blizzard had already had an idea like this? According to Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier in his new book “Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment”, Blizzard’s online store is also discussed

Schreier said Blizzard had the idea to turn Battle.net into a digital online store for PC games in 2000, before Valve launched the Counter-Strike client. This has developed into the most successful online store today on PC, Steam.

And after that, Patrick Wyat (Patrick Wyat), a former Blizzard employee who worked in that era. clarified and added information via a personal blog that the idea for the online store came from Mike O’Brien, who is also one of the former Blizzard staff members.

As for why we used the name Battle.net when it could have been called Blizzard.net, it was because they wanted the store to be able to sell non-Blizzard games without causing confusion among customers and it was a store that specialized only in games Blizzard, which is considered very unfortunate. In this store, this actually doesn’t happen. Because nowadays the profit value of Steam is so enormous that there is almost no need to produce games to sell yourself.