Blizzard Has No Plans To Turn Battle.net Into A Steam Rival

During BlizzCon, CD Projekt Red announced that both The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered and Cyberpunk 2077 will debut on Blizzard’s proprietary storefront, Battle.net, before the year concludes. While this might lead many to assume a massive influx of third-party games is on the horizon, Blizzard has clarified in interviews that it intends to maintain strict curation standards for the platform moving forward.

Why Battle.net Has No Ambitions to Rival Steam

Battle.net actually predates Steam, having originally debuted in 1997 alongside the launch of the first Diablo game to facilitate multiplayer matchmaking and community chat. For decades, it remained exclusively a digital roof for Blizzard’s own intellectual properties. That tradition began to shift in 2017 when Destiny 2 arrived on the launcher, eventually opening the door for other Activision franchises like Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot.

Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, titles from Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda—including Avowed, Sea of Thieves, The Outer Worlds 2, and Doom: The Dark Ages—also found a home on the launcher. With CD Projekt Red’s masterpieces now joining the lineup, industry observers naturally wonder if an open floodgate of third-party releases is imminent.

However, speaking with Polygon at BlizzCon, Blizzard’s Andrew Guerrero firmly dismissed the notion that the company aims to compete directly with giants like Steam or the Epic Games Store.

“We’re obviously not out there trying to do the Steam or Epic Game Store thing. We really look at ourselves as, you know, we have our audience. We have a passionate core of people that play Blizzard games and games similar to Blizzard, and if something makes sense for them, we’ll get after it,” Guerrero explained. “It’s a much more focused approach, I’d say, of ‘What do we think our players would absolutely love? What are the top-tier quality experiences out there that we might be able to get some more exposure to, and does it make sense?'”

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Open Marketplaces

Elaborating on the technical side of onboarding external titles, Guerrero noted the distinct infrastructure differences. “If you look at Steam, they spend a lot of time making a platform that is explicitly for publishing games on the platform,” he stated. “We didn’t really build Battle.net for that, but we did spend some time getting it to a place where it’s much more straightforward, and we can do it without it being completely bespoke.”

Crucially, Guerrero dismissed any possibility of Battle.net transitioning into an automated, self-publishing storefront. Observing the overwhelming saturation and curation hurdles that plague competitors like Steam, Blizzard is determined to shield its community from endless noise.

“We really value our players’ time and attention,” Guerrero emphasized. “They’re on our platform. They’re looking at games that we’re showing them. We really want that to be something that we’re pretty confident is going to be appealing to them. If we went super, super wide, the curation just sort of becomes its own thing, and that’s just not what we’re trying to be.”

While whimsical platformers like Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time might stray slightly from the traditional Blizzard aesthetic, cinematic RPGs like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 feel right at home. For now, the gaming community will have to monitor how these upcoming releases perform and what other handpicked titles might eventually earn a spot on the platform.

Source: Polygon