Blizzard Reportedly Could Have Turned Battle.net Into a Steam Competitor

Industry journalist Jason Schreier has recently published his book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, on the 30-year-old history of Blizzard. As revealed in the book, Blizzard developers pitched an idea of a digital store for PC games that could have been a major rival to Steam.

As spotted by PC Gamer, Schreier reported that several years prior to the launch of Steam, former Blizzard programmer Patrick Wyatt and others introduced a plan for the company on a plan "to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games." Thus, Battle.net, the store for Blizzard games, could have been expanded to the entire variety of PC titles, which would have brought Blizzard dominance over the gaming market. The creator of Battle.net as a free online multiplayer for Blizzard games Mike O'Brien also supported the pitch. However, the company's upper management rejected the idea, and Blizzard's potential monopoly didn't happen.

Later, in 2003, Valve launched Steam as a platform to release Counter-Strike updates and then required Half-Life 2 players to use the platform. Gradually, Steam became the most popular and extensive online store for PC games from a wide range of developers. Blizzard, in its turn, started shipping its games on Steam only a year ago.

Battle.net still operates as a platform for Blizzard and Activision games. We can only speculate how different this platform and Steam could have been now if the programmers had pursued their idea.

In his book, Jason Schreier shares some other interesting facts from Blizzard's history. Before the book's release, he held an AMA session, during which he talked about the possible launch of Warcraft 4 and other internal processes of the company. He also shared that some of the Blizzard Games, namely the StarCraft, Overwatch, and Diablo series, could have had a Netflix adaptation, but Blizzard sued Netflix for poaching their employee.

Recently, Jason Schreier shared a piece of the book and overviewed the start of Blizzard's success.

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