Battle.net’s name is changing—just in time for its 20th anniversary

Blizzard's longtime online matchmaking service will soon be known as "Blizzard tech."
If you've touched PC gaming over the last two decades, chances are good that you've logged in to the Battle.net service at least once. Blizzard Entertainment's hugely popular online-gaming network has connected every one of the developer's PC games since 1996, and while the service has expanded and added myriad options over the years, its name has held on—which we at Ars think is awesome, considering "dot net" sounds delightfully dated.

Apparently, 1996 called, and it wants its old-sounding domain name back.

Blizzard used its World of Warcraft blog to announce the name-change news on Wednesday, where an unnamed representative confirmed that the company's online-matchmaking services will soon be dubbed "Blizzard tech." The company didn't offer a firm date for the name change other than indicating that we can expect the change "over the next several months."

The post's main explainer for the change is "occasional confusion and inefficiencies related to having two separate identities under which everything falls—Blizzard and Battle.net." But really, that's the kind of housecleaning excuse that might have made more sense when Activision and its cash showed up in 2008.

Honestly, the announcement's wording makes it sound like this name-change policy is the tip of the iceberg for Blizzard's online service offerings; how, exactly, does a name change require an ongoing, several-months process? The answer probably lies in the fact that we're not seeing just a straight-up name change. "Blizzard tech" is described in the post as a catch-all term for various interconnected services, including "Blizzard Streaming," which currently lets players tie their Blizzard credentials to a Facebook account to stream live gameplay on their Facebook accounts, and "Blizzard Voice," a cross-game VOIP system that still only exists in an alpha state.

Between Overwatch's popularity on consoles and Hearthstone's explosion on smartphone platforms, a ground-up remolding of the Battle.n—er, sorry, Blizzard tech—platform probably makes logistical sense, should the company have more cross-platform connectivity in mind for its players. As Diablo series co-creator David Brevik once said, the platform began in a far humbler state, running solely on one PC to serve as nothing more than a matchmaking IP-address swap system for that original game's December 31, 1996 launch.
There's only so much sadness we can devote to this name change, especially when the name refers to something that looks nothing like the original barebones service. Still, today the veteran PC gamers at Ars are revving up their nostalgia and softly whispering the phrase "zug zug" in honor of the original name.