Obsidian has announced Avowed’s launch date and details, and there’s an interesting new detail that has been added to it.
As they revealed on the Xbox Newswire:
“Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming fantasy RPG, launches on February 18, 2025, with pre-orders beginning today for Xbox Series X|S, the Xbox app on Windows, Battle.net, and Steam, or play it on day one with Game Pass.”
This will be the first time that a Microsoft published game that isn’t made by Activision Blizzard is coming to their client. It also raises questions on some other things that Microsoft doesn’t seem to have decided on in the fallout of their acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
So Battle.net definitely has its dedicated userbase, each portioned off to the very distinct communities of their franchises. It’s likely that the overlap between gamers who play Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, and Overwatch 2 isn’t that big at all, and yet Activision Blizzard has assembled them all to use what is one of the oldest PC game clients still thriving.
Microsoft doesn’t share too many details to this particular announcement. So is it possible they brought Avowed to Battle.net because its fantasy theme puts it in the same wheelhouse as most Blizzard games? One could credibly make the argument that this is simply about bringing a game there that Microsoft thinks those gamers would be willing to buy there too.
But there could be another side to this, which is that Microsoft may choose to leverage Battle.net as one more platform to bring their first party games moving forward. Existing Battle.net may not necessarily like this arrangement, but it would reflect closer coordination between their many studios and publishing departments.
Of course, Activision Blizzard themselves made changes to Battle.net constantly that the fans didn’t like either, so how the userbase takes to this will depend on Microsoft’s implementation. It’s certainly interesting in that in an earlier time, Microsoft may have decided that maintaining Battle.net is an unnecessary expense, and they could have definitely chosen to close the client and force the users to move into their other platforms, such as Game Pass.
But we know that Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer is working off of a completely different paradigm now. Since Microsoft now sees that it’s a good thing to reach out to the gamers on as many platforms as possible, they will now see it as a good thing that they can maintain as many different platforms as they own.
So Battle.net users eventually getting the entire Microsoft Gaming library in a client tab is a small price pay, for the knowledge that Microsoft will continue to nurture their small section of PC gaming, because it’s what the users want.
