Twenty years ago in 1996, Blizzard launched their online services and dubbed it “Battle.net”. This service was the backbone for every title that’s ever come down the Blizzard pipeline; Diablo, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Starcraft, just to name a few. But as of now, that’s all going out the window as Blizzard is changing the name of the service so that it falls in line with all of their other services. The company hasn’t announced the updated name for the service but has provided the reason on why the name change is occurring.
We’re going to be transitioning away from using the Battle.net name for our gaming service and the functionality connected to it. Battle.net technology will continue to serve as the central nervous system for Blizzard games—nothing is changing in that regard. We’ll just be referring to our various products and services using the Blizzard name instead. You’ve already seen this recently with things like “Blizzard Streaming” and “Blizzard Voice,” and more changes are on the way.
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. 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.
We just wanted to make sure everyone was aware as we moved forward with this change over the next several months; we’ll provide any relevant updates as the transition progresses.
Makes sense to me, just as long as they don’t end up calling it Sky.net or GlaDOS or even SHODAN. Seeing how Blizzcon 2016 is right around the corner (November 4-5 2016), I’d imagine that the new name for Battle.net will be announced or even rolled out then.
