Blizzard could have turned Battle.net into an online games store years before Steam launched

What could have been: Steam is the dominant force in PC gaming, boasting millions of users, tens of thousands of games, and more than $10 billion in annual revenue. Now imagine that instead of Valve running an enormously successful online games store, it had been Blizzard. It might have happened, had executives not decided against turning Battle.net into a third-party games store many years before Steam came onto the scene.

The revelation that Blizzard could have potentially taken Valve's position was revealed in the new book by renowned game journalist Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment.

As reported by PC Gamer, Schreier writes that several years before Valve moved Steam out of beta on September 12, 2003 – not long after MySpace launched – a Blizzard programmer named Patrick Wyatt and others pitched their bosses an idea to turn Battle.net into a digital store featuring a variety of PC games.

Really old-school Steam

Mike O'Brien, the engineer who pitched and built Battle.net as a free online multiplayer service for Blizzard titles, liked the idea, but the company's executives at the time weren't convinced and rejected the proposal.

Also read: 20 Years of Steam: From Half-Life 2 to the Steam Deck

Battle.net was launched on December 31, 1996, a few days before the original Diablo was released.

O'Brien, Wyatt, and programmer Jeff Strain left Blizzard in 2000 over a disagreement about the direction Warcraft 3 was heading to found ArenaNet, developer of Guild Wars.

Blizzard and Battle.net are staples of the PC gaming industry, but it would be interesting to know how things would have turned out had the service started selling games almost seven years before Steam landed.

While Blizzard could have made even more money if it launched a pre-Steam store, it's hard to imagine its version being more successful than Valve's behemoth.

Last month, a slew of highly anticipated new releases, including 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.

Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment is available now. It's described as The Social Network for the video game industry, a riveting examination of Blizzard Entertainment's rise and shocking downfall.