Oof: Years before Steam, a Blizzard engineer wanted to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store, but was reportedly turned down
The Steam competitor that never was.
Can you imagine Battle.net beating Steam, then the primary online digital distribution platform ending up being owned by Activision?
I get the icks just thinking about it.
The worst part is it's not that far fetched, we're actually pretty lucky that valve isn't massively predatory and we didn't end up with bobby kotick instead of gaben
Battlenet brought some really clever innovations back in the day!
If it was 2010 and you had both running, battlenet was clearly superior.
Battlenet's UI and presentation looked great. Automatic patches, lots of settings to where files should go, info about the game. They also had this sweet feature where you can play when it has the core files, and it continues to download in the background, which still doesn't exist in non-battlenet games.
Really though, 2010 was also when Blizzard started to fall apart too. Constant churning of WoW expansions, deciding to split StarCraft 2 into three games, and making Diablo 3 look "prettier" was all bad signs.
If Blizzard owned something comparable to Steam they could have become too big to be bought by Activision.
Its possible that being the platform meant they wouldn't have been bought up.
You have to realize that if they had become Steam, they would have had so much money they probably wouldn't have sold to Activision. Hell, they probably would have been the ones buying Activision.
Valve asked several companies to build something like Steam, was turned down every time and decided to do it themselves.
Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren't on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.
I remember reading a very long (but fascinating) 11 part series of posts a couple of years ago on reddit about scummy stupid Blizzard. Here it is, if anyone still cares.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/
oof. years before heavier-than-air flight, an engineer in Florence wanted to utilise novel aerodynamic techniques to create a "flying helix", but was reportedly ignored.
Yes, right this way to the Florentine Helicopter Mr. Bryant
We dodged a bullet, I'd say