In another timeline, Blizzard may have its own version of Valve‘s PC-dominating Steam store, but in our timeline it reportedly rejected a pitch back to expand its Battle.net launcher into a broader PC gaming storefront.
That’s according to a new report from Bloomberg reporter and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels author Jason Schreier, who, in his new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (as PC Gamer spotted), writes that former Blizzard programmer Patrick Wyatt proposed a plan “to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games” around 2000, three years before Valve released the Counter-Strike client that grew into the mega-store Steam is today.
Mike O’Brien, who’d go on to join Wyatt and Jeff Strain to co-found Guild Wars studio ArenaNet after leaving Blizzard, apparently supported the pitch at the time, but the idea of a Battle.net store never made it past the company’s upper management. You’ve got to wonder if someone in the company’s C-suite was kicking themselves once again last year when Blizzard began bringing a selection of its games to Steam, now including Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, and the new Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred expansion.
Schreier’s book, citing interviews from some 350 current and former Blizzard employees, has turned up some surprising anecdotes, from canceled games like sci-fi Diablo and a Warcraft take on Helldivers to a short-lived Star Wars RTS concept that eventually became StarCraft.
Believe it or not, Blizzard’s in good company: BioWare also “missed our big opportunity to be Steam” and sell The Witcher, with one dev saying “we’re kicking ourselves about it now.”
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