Hot off the heels of Chris Metzen retiring, Blizzard has just announced that in the next few months they will be renaming their online services to fit a more cohesive and recognizable moniker. This means that services, such as Battle.net, will be losing their current name in favor of something more easily associated with Blizzard’s name. Blizzard has claimed this is being done in an effort to stem confusion from having different identities for what are essentially the same company and services.
They have expanded on this further by stating that originally, when Battle.net was conceived, it was not common practice for games to provide an online networking service for themselves. In an effort to make it easier to explain what exactly Battle.net was they gave the service a unique name and identity so it could be easily recognizable and understood. Today, we are in an era where online gaming and networking is the norm, it is expected and commonplace. The name Battle.net is now no more than a novel memory of a time when online gaming was still being born.
This is becoming a much more normal practice as companies consolidate their services into single easily recognizable branding. You may recall Sony did something similar as recently as 2015 when they renamed and unified their various Sony Entertainment Network services into the single much more popular PlayStation Network.
