Blizzard Bids Farewell To Battle.Net

September 21, 2016 Former GT Staff Writer

After 20 years of service Blizzard has decided to retire the Battle.Net moniker and will be moving onto calling it Blizzard Tech instead, although this change does not affect anything on the user end or the services provided. Battle.Net stems from an era where online multi-player gaming was neither the standard nor commonplace so a lot of effort went into making this aspect of their products and services stand out. This, however, is not the case anymore so the company has decided to consolidate all their properties under the Blizzard umbrella.

Read the full memo below:

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 it as Blizzard tech 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.