Blizzard to Drop Battle.net Name

Blizzard, which has long since used the name Battle.net for its online services for games like World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft, has announced plans to phase out the term and simply call it Blizzard.

In a new blog post, the company revealed its plans to transition away from the term used by its online gaming service and the functionality connected to it.

“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 our various products and services using the Blizzard name instead,” they stated.

The company has already started the move, by naming its streaming service Blizzard Streaming, and its voice chat system Blizzard Voice. More, it says, are on the way until the  company drops the moniker entirely.

“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. 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.

“Given that built-in multiplayer support is a well-understood concept and more of a normal expectation these days, there isn’t as much of a need to maintain a separate identity for what is essentially our networking technology.”

Battle.net launched with the release of Diablo and served all of its multiplayer games since then. World of Warcraft did not adopt Battle.net until several years after its release, and has yet to implement the BattleTag system used in its other games. As such, many players are still unable to claim the names they want in the MMORPG due to squatters. Whether this move away from Battle.net to a more generic Blizzard service will have any impact on the company’s account management system remains to be seen.

The company’s latest game is World of Warcraft: Legion.