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

Even though The Witcher 3 Remastered and Cyberpunk 2077 are coming to Battle.net, Blizzard tells Polygon not to expect a flood of third-party games

CD Projekt Red confirmed at BlizzCon that both The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered and Cyberpunk 2077 will come to Battle.net, Blizzard's proprietary game storefront, before the end of the year. You should expect this to kick off a large wave of third-party Battle.net launches, though, as Blizzard told Polygon it's still being very picky about what will come to the service in the future.

Blizzard doesn't want Battle.net to be the next Steam

Battle.net predates Steam, having launched in 1997 alongside the original Diablo as a platform for player chats and listings of multiplayer servers. Over time, it became the hub for buying Blizzard (and only Blizzard) games on PC. Things stayed that way until Destiny 2 launched on the service in 2017. In the years since, other Activision-published series like Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot made their way to Battle.net as well.

Following Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda titles like Avowed, Sea of Thieves, The Outer Worlds 2, and Doom: The Dark Ages also made their way to Battle.net. Now that CD Projekt Red games are coming to Battle.net, you'd be remiss not to wonder if we should expect a flood of other third-party titles to come in the future.

Despite this trend, Blizzard's Andrew Guerrero quickly made it clear during a BlizzCon interview with Polygon that Blizzard has no ambition of taking on the likes of Steam.

'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?'"

The issues with Steam that Battle.net wants to avoid

Later in the interview, I asked Guerrero about what the addition of support for third-party games entails from a development standpoint. "If you look at Steam, they spend a lot of time making a platform that is explicitly for publishing games on the platform," he responded. "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."

That said, Guerrero said that he doesn't think Battle.net will ever get to "a place where it's, like, hit the self-publish button, everything flows through." He sees the game curation struggles that storefronts like Steam and Epic's face, and doesn't want to put games on Battle.net that Blizzard fans won't enjoy.

"We really value our players' time and attention," he said. "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 I'm not sure Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is very Blizzard-coded, it's easy to see how CD Projekt Red RPGs like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 better fit the bill. For now, we're in a wait-and-see state, waiting to find out how well those games do on Battle.net and want other titles Blizzard deems worthy of launching on it.