Late on Monday, Blizzard Entertainment announced the return of Battle.net as the official name of its online multiplayer platform. The video game giant had rebranded the legendary site as just Blizzard almost a year ago, but fans and developers claimed for its comeback loud enough for them to be heard.
The company backtracked on its decision alleging Battle.net “is the central nervous system for Blizzard games,” and admitted that overhauling the legacy domain was a mistake in the first place.
However, the online gaming pioneer is not completely turning back from its marketing strategies: the new logo and branding of the platform will be Blizzard Battle.net for all intents and purposes, adding yet another layer of confusion to an already confusing back-and-forth of names and collective identity.
https://t.co/DG9TwQuD9x name stays! https://t.co/DG9TwQuD9x Update https://t.co/S47BbJEchD …
So happy thankyou for listening @Blizzard_Ent— Spaz (@SpazNZ) August 15, 2017
Battle.net will remain a historic piece of online gaming
While Blizzard’s intent to give Battle.net a makeover never reached the domain name itself, the platform and its looks did get the rebranding treatment first by changing a few elements and then by getting rid of the iconic logo.
Battle.net was born as an industry breakthrough to bring online playability to PC games, most notably titles of the Warcraft and Diablo series, both developed, of course, by Blizzard. Creators had to go through bureaucratic hell to get the .net domain, but the name battle was chosen simply because it was cool
The service was rudimentary at best by the time it came out, but it ended up working better than expected and consuming fewer resources than it should thanks to the inherent peer-to-peer development of Blizzard games at the time. Back then, the whole platform ran on a single server.
20 years after its debut, Blizzard Entertainment announced an overhaul that was long overdue, judging by prior hints over years past. However, it took them just a rebranding attempt to figure out the meaning of the saying: If it isn’t broken then don’t fix it.
Battle.net’s identity prevailed above new changes
Users kept referring (and most likely will keep referring) to the Blizzard app as Battle.net during the transition period, a pervasive identity that was most highlighted by Bungie upon the release of Destiny 2.
Blizzard made the “exceptional choice” of calling Battle.net by its old name in spite of recently rebranding it and calling it a one-time thing that slipped on the release notes of the Bungie sequel.
Now, fans and their wishful thinking can only hope the video game giant re-considers bringing back the iconic logo as well. For now, it seems they are compromising with just the name and pushing the brand ahead. Baby steps.
Source: Blizzard Entertainment
