Blizzard is Bringing Overwatch 2 and Other Games to Steam

As Microsoft is still dealing with final regulatory issues to complete its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment announced yesterday that it would bring a selection of its games to Steam, starting with Overwatch 2. The free-to-play team-based shooter will be released on Steam on August 10 with support for cross-platform play through Blizzard’s Battle.net service.

While Activision already offers Call of Duty and many of its other games on Steam, Blizzard Entertainment has made the PC versions of Overwatch, Diablo, and its other games exclusively available on its own Battle.net launcher, with some rare exceptions. The original Diablo game and Warcraft 1 and 2 can be found on the DRM-free platform GOG, as an example.

“Battle.net is the home of all our PC players, and over the years, we’ve evolved our platform to support updated technologies, capabilities, and our communities’ expectations. But as we’ve evolved, the industry has evolved too–gaming is no longer just for specific communities as it was when Battle.net launched over two decades ago, gaming is for everyone–and though we remain committed to continually investing in and supporting Battle.net, we want to break down the barriers to make it easier for players everywhere to find and enjoy our games,” the company explained in the announcement yesterday.

The timing of this announcement is quite interesting. With its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is committed to making the company’s games available on more platforms, including cloud gaming services. While Blizzard Entertainment is still operating independently at the moment, the company has an established gaming platform on PC with Battle.net, which launched in the late 90s before Steam was even a thing.

Is Blizzard Entertainment already being influenced by Microsoft’s recent pro-gamers moves? That’s impossible to say, though it’s worth noting that Mike Ybarra, the current President of Blizzard Entertainment, previously worked at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President of Xbox Live and Xbox Game Pass. “It’s our goal at Blizzard to listen to players and try to exceed their expectations in everything we do,” Ybarra said yesterday.

It will be interesting to see which other games Blizzard is planning to release on Steam in the future. Old classic RTS games like Starcraft and Warcraft could certainly find a new audience there, but it would be quite surprising to see Diablo IV, Blizzard’s latest blockbuster release make its way to Steam any time soon. Indeed, it wouldn’t really make sense to give Valve a cut on the sales of a game that “sold-through more units than any other Blizzard title at an equivalent stage of release,” Activision Blizzard said in its FY2023 Q2 earnings report yesterday.