New Battle.net "similar to Xbox Live"

By Oli Welsh Published 6 August, 2009

Vision outlined for "social gaming network".

Perhaps feeling the need to explain to shareholders why it was delaying StarCraft II, Activision Blizzard has given a broad explanation of the features we can expect from its new Battle.net online gaming service.

Underlining just how important Battle.net is to the company, Blizzard's paymaster, Activision chief executive Bobby Kotick, weighed in on the subject with investors yesterday. He said it would be "similar to Xbox Live", "a social gaming network across all Blizzard's future games" and no less than "an investment in the future of gaming".

Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime stepped in to back up his boss' hyperbole. He said Battle.net would "add social networking features, cross-game communications, unified log-in and account management and more," according to Gamasutra's account of yesterday's earnings call.

"Eventually, it will allow [players] to connect, communicate and share experiences with each other through the service regardless of which Blizzard games they are playing," Morhaime said.

The unified login is already available, including the possibility of merging an existing World of Warcraft account with a Battle.net account.

Supporting Kotick's Xbox Live namecheck, we already know that WOW's Achievements - one of the closest and cleverest imitations of Microsoft's revolutionary system to date - will eventually become an integrated system across all Blizzard games.

Morhaime and Kotick's comments and repeated use of words like "social" and "communication" suggest that such other Live features like integrated voice chat, messaging, friends lists and alerts will make it into Battle.net.

We may learn more at BlizzCon in two weeks' time. Eurogamer will be there, so stay tuned.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (27) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Dizzy #1 3 years ago

    They could just have used Live of course and saved a few months of development time and $$$$

  • Xerx3s #2 3 years ago

    yadayadayada...WHEN IS DIABLO 3 OUT?!

  • JahB #3 3 years ago

    similar to Xbox live

    meaning we'll have to pay for it??
    Edited by 1 at 06/08/09 @ 09:57

  • Dizzy #4 3 years ago

    >meaning we'll have to pay for it??

    On PC Live is free.

  • LiveForever #5 3 years ago

    >On PC Live is free.

    It wasn't at first but noone paid for it so it was made free and the pc version is useless.
    Lets hope blizzard dont make the same mistake.

  • cianchristopher #6 3 years ago

    No, this will definitely be a paid for subscrpition - like World of Warcraft is. Didn't Bobby Kotick say he wanted a similar thing for Call of Duty? It seems that this is the way things are moving.

  • Xerx3s #7 3 years ago

    Fuck that, I'm not going to pay a monthly payment to play only one game. I guess that I will be forced to use hacked servers then.

  • Eury #8 3 years ago

    They already confirmed that it is free so stop spreading misinformation.

  • skillian #9 3 years ago

    You won't need to pay for Battle.net, are you crazy?

    And Live is terrible, why would anyone that isn't Microsoft actually want a game to use it?

    edit: Wow, -4 for slating GfW Live? I always thought that was a pretty widely-held opinion. However I couldn't even save my Dawn of War2 game last night because Live couldn't sign in, so my view hasn't changed.
    Edited by 2 at 06/08/09 @ 10:50

  • peak_performance #10 3 years ago

    I don't think it'll be a pay-to-use network personally, that would be very disappointing. Of course I would perhaps be willing to pay a small, optional sum (not as much as a WoW or Live subscription) every month if they integrated some features that let you stream live feeds from tournaments and other similar things, but nothing that I need to play the game any way I want to.

  • LazyDan #11 3 years ago

    I like the idea of being able to play Diablo 3 and talk to friends on WoW and vice versa - especially if it's handled in game. I like it a lot.

    My biggest bugbear with WoW right now is that I get better FPS when I run it fullscreen, but if I run it full screen I can't see any MSN messages, so I run it windowed but maximised just so I can talk to people on MSN at the same time. Make the cross chat spread to IMs, Blizzard!

  • ps3owner #12 3 years ago

    @lazyden

    get a second monitor, or third.

  • Wolfman #13 3 years ago

    So .... its basically a Steam competitor then?

  • hiddenranbir #14 3 years ago

    PC version isn't entirely useless. I like the way it handles voice chat. Voice playback goes into my headsets and leaves my speakers to deal with game sound.

    Usually everything gets pumped through the headphones!

    Either way, more community services must be a good thing. Competition and all that. Steam, Impulse, LIVE and now Battle.net. I guess xfire counts as well?

  • WinterSnowblind #15 3 years ago

    @skillian
    Live is easily the best online service there is out there, without it things like Steam and PSN certainly wouldn't exist.
    We could argue all the about the subscription, but it's not surprising to see other developers wanting to base their systems around it.

    If you're talking about Games for Windows Live, then that's another matter, but that's not what they were talking about here.

  • skillian #16 3 years ago

    @WinterSnowblind

    Steam wouldn't exist without Live? Can't agree with that tbh.

    And surely we are talking about Games for Windows Live, this is a PC-exclusive game after all.

  • davisorle #17 3 years ago

    Yeah i still remember everyone talking crap about the achievements back in the days and now Blizzard copied, Sony did with different poor name for them.. lol chain of gaming industry is awesome.

    The whole battle.Net transforming I was more than expecting it but didnt expect them to saw it out loud so raw about how it will be. Good thing though i dont like immitions.

  • figgis #18 3 years ago

    Blizzard will regret sucking from the Activision money teat.

  • Mooglepies #19 3 years ago

    In before B.net becomes a subscription service. I do hope not, I could care less about WoW and Starcraft 2 but I will want to play Diablo 3 in multiplayer. A lot.

  • Katsumoto #20 3 years ago

    Wasn't Steam out before the 360 was even released? Anyway, all this talk of "you can talk to friends across different games!" talk is quite perplexing. Surely we can already do that, and have been doing so for years? Steam enables you to chat to your friends no matter what game you're in, and the same goes for X-Fire which has been around even longer.

    edit: uh, as BuckoA51 has already said!:)
    Edited by 1 at 06/08/09 @ 12:44

  • Spekingur #21 3 years ago

    @skillian: I wouldn't call it fault of GFW that you couldn't save your game. I'd rather say it is a fault of the developers.

    And b.net, there was talk a while back to possibly make it subscription based, possibly for some premium services. They might change it into microexchangethingy.
    Edited by 1 at 06/08/09 @ 13:01

  • skillian #22 3 years ago

    I wouldn't call it fault of GFW that you couldn't save your game. I'd rather say it is a fault of the developers.

    Yet somehow it's the same problem that occurs in games like Gears of War and GTA4? Maybe there's a way around it for developers but it's clear that if GfWL wasn't included I wouldn't have had the problem.

    Anyway, it's not a big deal, but I just wanted to point out it still has its issues.

    edit: Does anyone know if it's possible to take the savegames of an online profile and move them to offline profile so I can still play when GfWL can't connect or my internet is down? Can I just copy the savegame files from My Documents?
    Edited by 1 at 06/08/09 @ 13:34

  • Domovoi #23 3 years ago

    "Wasn't Steam out before the 360 was even released?"

    Yes, but that was just the content delivery thing. The whole community/achievements thing didn't happen until sometime in 2007, two years or so after the 360's release.

  • skillian #24 3 years ago

    They both started around a similar time (Live was on original Xbox remember), but from slightly different angles. Live was really about multiplayer gaming, whereas Steam was about content delivery and DRM.

    It was inevitable that they would both add things like voice chat and friends lists after that - I don't think you can really accuse one of copying from the other.

  • PearOfAnguish #25 3 years ago

    It would be great if every game had its own separate system with their own achievements, chat system etc. After all, who wants to have everything integrated into one program?

  • GamesConnoisseur #26 3 years ago

    A copy B and C Copy B and so on....

    Everyone imitate and improves on what is a successful feature in competitor's product and even so that competitor is standing on the shoulder of another and so on.

    Accusations of rip-off is so boring really.. WE would want successful ideas to be adopted more widely and I applauds Blizzard for adopting the system. I just wished Apple had adopted a more cohesive achievement system in iPhone/iTouch games application instead of seemly leaving to each devs to implement their own interpretations.

    Well done to MS for doing so on a wide scale with X360 on the get go ...and to Sony for eventually implementing Trophy which is Achievement in all but name and nowt wrong with that to boot.

  • Orange #27 3 years ago

    GFWLive is absolutely terrible.