Blizzard did not want to make Battle.net the “first Steam”

A Blizzard engineer wanted to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store well before the launch of Steam. The idea, magnificent as Valve’s platform, its dominance in the sector and its $10 billion in revenue have demonstrated, was rejected by the distributor’s executives.

The guys at Blizzard are polishing the launch of Vessel of Hatredthe first expansion for Diablo IV that, together with the sixth season that has also begun, has made it -almost- look like a new game. Personally, I hadn’t played it for a while, I tried it and I really liked it, even though the DLC costs a lot, at least 40 euros.

Battle.net, the first Steam?

But we didn’t want to talk about games but about books and specifically the one written by the veteran journalist of the video game industry, Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. The book was published this week and in PcGamer They have offered a most significant advance.

Schreier writes that several years before Valve pulled Steam out of beta on September 12, 2003, a Blizzard programmer named Patrick Wyatt and other developers proposed the idea of “turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games”.

Mike O’Brien, the engineer responsible for creating Battle.net as a free online multiplayer service for Blizzard titles, liked the idea, but company executives at the time were not convinced and rejected the proposal.

Blizzard has been one of the largest distributors in the video game industry, but it would have been interesting to know how things would have turned out if the service had started selling games almost seven years before Steam arrived. Although perhaps it would not have had the success of the Valve store and in general the gaming industry would have changed little, surely the story for Blizzard would not have been the same if it had had its own Steam, perhaps it would not have ended up in Activision and later under Microsoft.

It must be said that O’Brien, Wyatt and programmer Jeff Strain left Blizzard in 2000 due to disagreements in the direction taken by the development of Warcraft 3. They founded ArenaNet, developer of Guild Wars. Battle.net never became Steam.