In March 2017, Blizzard began the process of rebranding its long-standing online gaming platform Battle.net. Fans have grown very accustomed to the service over the last couple of decades, so many were quite upset — and now the company has confirmed that it’s changing course as a result.
Yesterday, the studio behind World of Warcraft and Overwatch published a blog post laying out its revised plans for its online hub. Rather than transitioning away from the Battle.net moniker entirely, from next month it will be referred to as Blizzard Battle.net in order to bring it closer to the company’s broader branding efforts.
“Battle.net is the central nervous system for Blizzard games and the connective tissue that has brought Blizzard players together since 1996,” read the announcement. “The technology was never going away, but after giving the branding change further consideration and also hearing your feedback, we’re in agreement that the name should stay as well.”
Battle.net was originally released alongside Diablo, as a means of allowing players to chat with one another and enter multiplayer games. As games like Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III were released in subsequent years, the service became more and more sophisticated with all kinds of new features.
Given that so many of Blizzard’s most popular games offered engrossing online multiplayer, there was great benefit to the company operating its own infrastructure of this kind — especially when World of Warcraft introduced support for a revamped version of the service in 2009.
Today, Battle.net is arguably bigger than ever, serving as a portal to some of the biggest PC games of the moment like Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone. It’s set to add another major multiplayer experience in the coming months, as the PC version of Destiny 2 will utilize the platform thanks to the relationship between Blizzard and Bungie’s parent company, Activision.
Battle.net was never going to change that much aside from its name, but there will be many fans who are very pleased by Blizzard’s decision. It doesn’t always make sense for a video game studio to buckle to the demands of their audience, but in this case we see very little downside.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.