Blizzard, the company behind popular online games such as World of Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm, has today announced that it will cease using the Battle.net handle for its online services.
The moniker, Battle.net, was coined in 1996 alongside Diablo and has been used to power Blizzard’s heavy-hitting titles such as Starcraft, Overwatch and even the highly recommended mobile card game, Hearthstone. The decision to move away from Battle.net comes with the company’s expansions to newer platforms and that there’s been occasional confusion with the name. Simply put, the name, Battle.net, is now no longer needed.
In a forum post this morning, Blizzard said “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.”
“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,” the company explained. “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.”
Blizzard games will continue to operate as per normal, however, moving forward, the iconic name of which players have become accustomed to, Battle.net, will no longer exist.