After 21 long years of service, Battle.net is finally retiring.
Battle.net, Blizzard’s online gaming network and launch service, has officially been rebranded to simply “Blizzard”. The change came in an update to the system late last night, as many gamers discovered that the logo attached to their software had changed from the old Battle.net logo (seen above) to the more familiar Blizzard typography seen below.
Blizzard first hinted that they would be moving away from the Battle.net name in September of last year, when they shared in a blog post on the World of Warcraft website that they’d been encountering “confusion and inefficiencies related to having two separate identities under which everything falls—Blizzard and Battle.net”. The consolidation under the Blizzard name would move to simplify this.
Aside from the name and logo change, everything about the service is remaining the same. Despite this, some longtime Blizzard fans have expressed some disappointment in the change. In a popular post on reddit, users have expressed annoyance with the clunkiness of the new title, as well as being put off by the new logo. Many older users have just had their nostalgia triggered by the change, though, reminiscing over the old days when an online service like Battle.net was truly revolutionary for its time, even as awkward and rudimentary as it was back then; one user shared this photo from the old days of StarCraft back in the 1990s:
Battle.net was first launched in November of 1996, alongside the Blizzard game Diablo.