Update - October 15: In a blog post, Blizzard veteran Patrick Wyatt clarified that "the original idea for Battle.net, the business model (free), the name Battle.net itself, and the original programming implementation, were all Mike O’Brien." Likewise, the pitch to turn Battle.net into a digital for other PC games also came from O'Brien.
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 Blizzard considered a plan "to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games" around 2000, years before Valve released the Counter-Strike client that grew into the mega-store Steam is today.
In a blog post, Blizzard veteran Patrick Wyatt clarifies that this pitch came from Mike O'Brien, as did "the original idea for Battle.net, the business model (free), the name Battle.net itself, and the original programming implementation." (Correction: Initial reports suggested the storefront idea was Wyatt's proposal, but the programmer says he wanted "credit where credit is due.")
"One of the reasons that Battle.net was so-named, when it could simply have been called Blizzard.net, was to allow for selling non-Blizzard games without creating confusion as to their authorship," Wyatt adds.
O'Brien would go on to join Wyatt and Jeff Strain to co-found Guild Wars studio ArenaNet after leaving Blizzard, and as we now know, 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."
