Change is in the air over at Blizzard Entertainment. After the recent retirement of company staple Chris Metzen, Blizzard announced that its Battle.net platform will be receiving a new name in the coming months.
The company explained that it would be transitioning away from using the Battle.net namesake in favor of a Blizzard-branded title, similar to the recently released Blizzard Streaming and Blizzard Voice services. Although a new name hasn’t been officially released, we can expect Blizzard to be all over it.
Blizzard reasoned that Battle.net was created in a day and age where online multiplayer support was not an automatic expectation, so the service was given an individual identity. Nowadays, online support is axiomatic, and the branding can be confusing to some, as Blizzard explained in its news post:
“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.”
The timetable for the new branding of Battle.net hasn’t been determined yet, with Blizzard only stating that we'll see these changes implemented in the coming months.
