Blizzard Engineer wanted to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store even before the launch of Steam. The idea, grand as Valve’s platform, its dominance in the sector and its $10 billion in revenue has proven, was rejected by the distributor’s management.

This week, the guys at Blizzard are tweaking the launch of Vessel of Hatred, the first expansion for Diablo IV, which, along with the sixth season that has also started, has made it – almost – a new game. Personally, I haven’t played it in a while, I tried it and I really liked it, although the DLC costs a lot, at least 40 euros.

Battle.net, the first Steam?

But we didn’t want to talk about games, we wanted to talk about books, and specifically the one written by veteran video game industry journalist Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. The book came out this week and PcGamer offered a very significant preview.

Schreier writes that several years before Valve took Steam out of beta on September 12, 2003, a Blizzard programmer named Patrick Wyatt and other developers proposed the idea “turn Battle.net into a digital store for various PC games”.

Mike O’Brien, the engineer responsible for creating Battle.net as a free online multiplayer service for Blizzard titles, liked the idea, but the management of the company at the time was not convinced and they rejected the proposal.

Blizzard is one of the biggest distributors in the video game industry, but it would be interesting to know how things would develop if the service started selling games. almost seven years before the arrival of Steam. While it might not have been as successful as Valve’s business, and the gaming industry in general would have changed little, the story for Blizzard certainly wouldn’t have been the same if it had its own Steam, it might not have ended. at Activision and later under Microsoft.

It should be said that O’Brien, Wyatt and programmer Jeff Strain left Blizzard in 2000 due to disagreements over the development direction of Warcraft 3. They founded ArenaNet, the developer of Guild Wars. Battle.net never became Steam.