Blizzard missed the chance to create a competitor to Steam several years before Valve launched the service

Nowadays, PC gaming is inseparable from Steam, but in the early days of digital distribution services, the Valve store could have an unexpected competitor – Battle.net from Blizzard Entertainment.

Image source: Blizzard Entertainment

Let us remember that now the assortment of the Battle.net store is limited to games from Blizzard and Activision itself, but in the early 2000s the company had the opportunity to turn the service into an analogue of the then non-existent Steam.

As Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier recounted in his book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, in 2000, Blizzard management rejected a proposal to add third-party games to Battle.net.

Image source: Blizzard Entertainment

Steam turns 20 in 2023 (image source: Valve)

At launch, Steam was positioned as a more convenient way to deliver patches for Counter-Strike and did not even have a store, and in 2004 it angered gamers because it was required to play Half-Life 2.

Over the course of 20 years, Steam has grown to such a scale that even Blizzard, whose games on PC have always been Battle.net exclusives, began releasing their projects on the Valve store. At the end of September, the platform’s peak online number exceeded 38 million people.