The day Blizzard could have become Steam… but didn’t want to

Steam is currently the most dominant video game store in the entire PC world, a game store owned by Valve, the parent company, and led by the legendary and beloved Gabe Newell. Today, it is hard to imagine the world of computer gaming without Steam as the meeting and purchasing place for gamers worldwide.

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But from what we have learned, there was a window of opportunity for another company to take the position that Steam eventually occupied. Would the future of gaming have been the same? We will never know, but let’s tell the story.

In this story, imagine that instead of Valve running a hugely successful online game store, it was Blizzard. It could have happened if the executives had not decided against turning Battle.net into a third-party game store many years before Steam appeared on the scene.

A future where Blizzard would be as powerful as Valve today

The revelation that Blizzard could have potentially taken Valve’s place appears in the new book by the renowned video game journalist Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment.

According to PC Gamer, Schreier writes that several years before Valve took Steam out of beta on September 12, 2003, a Blizzard programmer named Patrick Wyatt and others pitched to their bosses an idea to turn Battle.net into a digital store with a variety of PC games.

Mike O’Brien, the engineer who proposed and built Battle.net as a free online multiplayer service for Blizzard’s titles, liked the idea. Still, the company’s executives at that time were not convinced and rejected the proposal.

Indeed, Battle.net was launched on December 31, 1996, a few days before the release of the original Diablo, which means they were ahead of Valve’s original idea by six years.

That said, although Blizzard could have made even more money if it had launched a store before Steam, it’s hard to imagine that its version would have been more successful than Valve’s giant.

As you may recall, last month, a series of highly anticipated releases, such as Space Marine 2, Black Myth: Wukong, and God of War: Ragnarök, helped Steam break its concurrent user record once again, attracting 38.3 million concurrent users.