Blizzard Games Coming to Steam - Major Breakthrough in Company's History
We have become witnesses to a historic event - Blizzard Entertainment has announced that its games will start coming to Steam. The first will be Overwatch 2, which will land on the platform next month.
Blizzard will finally release its games on Steam. The trail will be blazed by Overwatch 2, which will hit Valve's platform on August 10 (where the game already has its card), which will coincide with the debut of season 5 of the big update called Invasion.
This is to be the first of "several selected games", which will soon be found on Steam. Unfortunately, it was not specified what titles we can expect to see in the future. Presumably, the biggest hits like Diablo 4 will not be among them, although for now their release on Steam cannot be completely ruled out.
Probably no company has resisted distributing its PC games through Steam for as long as Blizzard Entertainment. Even Electronic Arts and Ubisoft eventually began releasing their titles on the platform, albeit intermittently, not all of them and on top of that with additional requirements.
Blizzard, moreover, will follow in the footsteps of both of these publishers: to play Overwatch 2 it will still be necessary to log in via Battle.net. More details are to be known "when the time is right".
Choice of Overwatch 2 as Blizzard's first game on Steam is unlikely to need explaining. A free-to-play shooter is probably the perfect kind of game if we want to attract the attention of a lot of Steam users (and gamers in general).
Besides it's no secret, that second Overwatch quickly lost popularity after its release. Timing the release of the game on PC gaming's most popular platform with the new season and the release of the biggest update yet should help boost a somewhat thinned user base
The other thing is that this decision will have interesting consequences, first and foremost making information on Blizzard's games through available to players the Steam database. This way we will see, among other things, statistics on popularity, but probably also potential activities of dataminers revealing development plans for these productions.
Beyond that, Overwatch 2 will have strong competition on Steam. On the platform, it has long been possible to download Paladins, still enjoying considerable popularity (via Steam DB). There is also no shortage of other team-based FPSs, led by Team Fortress 2, which, despite Valve's neglect, is not only still alive, but is even experiencing a renaissance after the debut of a major (albeit de facto fan-made) update.
