Battle.net isn’t Battle.net anymore, even if Blizzard calls it Battle.net

We're going to call it Battle.net as long as Blizzard calls it Battle.net

It has been over eight months now since Blizzard made the low-key announcement that it would be "transitioning away" from the longstanding Battle.net branding in favor of a more generalized "Blizzard Tech" label. And it has been two months since the Battle.net Launcher was replaced with the identical "Blizzard Launcher" app (aka, the "Blizzard Desktop app") that now powers everything from World of Warcraft to Heroes of the Storm.
So it was a bit confusing last week when Activision used the Battle.net name repeatedly in announcing that Destiny 2 was coming to Blizzard's online platform on the PC. Blizzard seemed to ignore its own branding standards too: an official news post headlined "Destiny 2 Coming to Battle.net!" uses the Battle.net branding four times in the body text but doesn't mention the "Blizzard Launcher" or "Blizzard app" or anything similar even once.

Polygon noticed this discrepancy too and got a Blizzard representative to give a short, vague statement as to the confusion. "It's still Blizzard Launcher," the rep told Polygon. "We made an exception for this announcement."

On the one hand, we can understand why both Activision and Blizzard would want to revert to the Battle.net branding for such a major announcement. The Battle.net name has been well-known among PC gamers since it launched alongside the original Diablo in 1996. Using the name immediately links Destiny 2 to a long history of multiplayer Blizzard titles, while talking about the Blizzard Launcher would likely just link a lot of readers to Google to figure out what the hell they were talking about.
On the other hand, this one time "exception" highlights just how badly Blizzard's rebranding effort for Battle.net has gone. Months after pulling the trigger on the new name, the companies behind it are still unwilling to give up the old name for fear of confusing people. That's a bit ironic, since the original transition announcement cited "occasional confusion and inefficiencies related to having two separate identities under which everything falls—Blizzard and Battle.net."

For what it's worth, visiting battle.net in a web browser still displays the old name and logo prominently, rather than redirecting to the more generalized blizzard.com or something similar. Looks like that "occasional confusion" is still present in the company's web operations.

It's enough to make one wonder why Blizzard decided to give up on such a recognizable gaming brand in the first place, in favor of a new brand that it's apparently unwilling to promote. Here at Ars, we've been struggling with how to handle this naming situation, using parentheticals and backlinks to try to explain the dual branding. For now, though, we're going to continue to use the well-known Battle.net name until Blizzard shows it's no longer willing to do the same.