Gaming IndustryOof: Years before Steam, a Blizzard engineer wanted to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store, but was reportedly turned downWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustryOof: Years before Steam, a Blizzard engineer wanted to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store, but was reportedly turned downWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The world of today is the result of every decision and accident that led to it, which is a disconcerting thought given how many things it’s possible toalmostdo in a lifetime. Case in point, according to a new book on the history of Blizzard, the Warcraft studio rejected a proposal to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store years before Steam launched.
Making an expensive new RTS does seem risky, so I get it, but past rejections sure can sting in hindsight. Schreier reports in the book that a few years before Steam launched, a group of employees pitched the company on a plan “to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games.”
Battle.net remains a PC gaming institution even as a platform just for Blizzard andActivisiongames, and who knows if it would’ve taken off like Steam had Blizzard pursued O’Brien’s idea. But if ithadworked out, how different would PC gaming be today?
For a variety of reasons detailed in Schreier’s book—including disappointment over the Battle.net idea’s rejection and disagreement over the direction of Warcraft 3—O’Brien, Wyatt, and another Blizzard programmer, Jeff Strain, left the company in 2000 to found Guild Wars developer ArenaNet. They did pretty well for themselves in the timeline where Blizzard didn’t launch a Steam competitor before Steam, and although it isn’t perfect, Steam could be a lot worse—so maybe we ended up on the better side of the causal split? We’ll never know.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment is available nowfrom publisher Hachette Book Group. Schreier began working on the book in 2021, and says that 350 interviews went into its making.
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Correction: This article was updated after publishing to clarify that the idea to turn Battle.net into a store was initially O’Brien’s.
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