The Steam competitor that never was.
The world of today is the result of every decision and accident that led to it, which is a disconcerting thought given how many things it’s possible to almost do in a lifetime. Case in point, according to a new book on the history of Blizzard, the Warcraft studio rejected a proposal to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store years before Steam launched.
It just released today, but we’ve already learned some interesting stuff from the book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment by long-time games industry reporter Jason Schreier. Blizzard may be trying once again to make a StarCraft shooter, and has reportedly rejected multiple proposals for new RTSes.
Making an expensive new RTS does seem risky, so I get it, but past rejections sure can sting in hindsight. Schreier reports in the book that around 2000, former Blizzard programmer Patrick Wyatt pitched the company on a plan “to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games.”
The idea was supported by Mike O’Brien, the engineer who first pitched and built Battle.net as a free online multiplayer service for Blizzard’s games, but was rejected by the company’s leadership. In 2003, Valve launched Steam as a way to deliver Counter-Strike updates, and then controversially required Half-Life 2 players to use the platform. It’s now the most popular PC game store by far, and after holding out for a long time, Blizzard finally started releasing its games on Steam just last year.
Battle.net remains a PC gaming institution even as a platform just for Blizzard and Activision games, and who knows if it would’ve taken off like Steam had Blizzard pursued Wyatt’s idea. But if it had worked out, how different would PC gaming be today? Blizzard might never have merged with Activision, for one thing.
For a variety of reasons detailed in Schreier’s book—including a disagreement over the direction of Warcraft 3—O’Brien, Wyatt, and a third Blizzard programmer, Jeff Strain, left the company in 2000 to found Guild Wars developer ArenaNet. So they did pretty well for themselves in the timeline where Blizzard didn’t launch a Steam competitor before Steam, and although it isn’t perfect, Steam could be a lot worse—maybe we ended up on the better side of the causal split?
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment is available now from publisher Hachette Book Group. Schreier began working on the book in 2021, and says that 350 interviews went into its making.
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