Blizzard could have turned Battle.net into an online games store years before Steam launched | Executives didn’t like the idea

https://www.techspot.com/news/105063-blizzard-could-have-turned-battlenet-online-games-store.html

14 Comments

  1. PMmeyourspicythought on

    blizzard has made some of the dumbest moves ever in terms of providing infrastructure for community and making sure that people are incentivized to stay playing the game. Like, it’s IDIOTIC that in D2R the chat features are fucking awful.

  2. Just shows you why execs who don’t know their own product and don’t listen to the customer always make short-term decisions that have long-term effects.

  3. Let’s just be happy they missed that boat. Steam is not perfect, but they are doing a splendid job and being a private company really helps.

  4. Who the fuck cares? Fuck the Blizzard Execs. They’ve destroyed a creative powerhouse.

  5. And record labels could have bought Napster and used it to sell music instead of letting a computer company steal all of the profits from their industry.

  6. Every decision Blizzard has made in the last 10 years has been awful, so we should all be thankful we have Steam instead of these fuckers

  7. Having used battle.net a long long time ago along with signing up for steam relatively early (only way to get certain half-life updates), no it couldn’t have. Battle.net was a broken buggy mess and regardless of the options it may or may not have added to the “store”, the DRM and login oversight, all that, it was a game reg check, an authentication software (like yu play, etc) and that was its main and only function. people hated it more than wanted it. At least steam was hands-off and meant more of a technical distribution and patching engine, and NOT a nanny engine to make things worse.

    In short, no, battle.net could NOT have been steam before steam. Those of us there remember it.