Oof: A Blizzard engineer tried to turn Battle.net, years before Steam, into a third party game store but was reportedly rejected

It's a disconcerting idea to think that the world we live in today is the culmination of all of our decisions and accidents. According to a book on the history Blizzard, a proposal was rejected by the Warcraft studio to turn Battle.net in to a third-party store years before Steam was launched.

Jason Schreier, a veteran games industry reporter, has just published a book called Play Nice: the Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard. We've already learned a lot from it. Blizzard is reportedly working on a new StarCraft shooter and has rejected multiple proposals for a new RTS.

Making a new RTS that costs a lot of money is risky. I get that. But past rejections can be painful in retrospect. Schreier writes in his book that, around 2000, Patrick Wyatt, a former Blizzard programmer, pitched a plan to the company "to turn Battle.net [into] a digital store" for a wide variety of PC games.

Mike O'Brien was the engineer who pitched and built Battle.net, a free online multiplayer for Blizzard's game, but the idea was rejected by company leadership. Valve launched Steam in 2003 as a platform to deliver Counter-Strike patches. Half-Life 2 users were then required to use it, which was controversial. Steam is the most popular PC games store. After a long wait, Blizzard released its games on Steam only last year.

Battle.net is still a PC gaming institution, even if Blizzard had pursued Wyatt’s idea. Who knows if the platform would have taken off as Steam if Blizzard had pursued Wyatt’s idea? What would PC gaming look like today if had worked out? Blizzard and Activision might not have merged, for example.

O'Brien, Wyatt and Jeff Strain left Blizzard in 2000 for a number of reasons, including a disagreement about the direction of Warcraft 3. They then founded ArenaNet, the developer of Guild Wars. They did well in the timeline that Blizzard didn’t launch a Steam rival before Steam. And although it’s not perfect, Steam could have been a lot worse. Maybe we ended up on a better side of the casual split?

Hachette Book Group has published Play Nice: the Rise, Fall, & Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. Schreier started working on the book back in 2021 and claims that 350 interviews were conducted.