Blizzard is ditching the Battle.net name

Battle.net has been synonymous with Blizzard for most of the game studio's history, and for good reason: from Diablo onward, the online service helped usher in the concept of free, fully-integrated multiplayer matchmaking. Times have changed, however, and Blizzard is putting the Battle.net name to rest. The underlying technology will remain, but you'll see it referred to simply as Blizzard technology. The Battle.net label is outdated in an era where native multiplayer support is "more of a normal expectation" than a novelty, the developer says. Moreover, the branding is sometimes confusing and redundant. Why does Blizzard have to treat its own service as a separate beast?

The transition should take place over the "next several months."

It's a sad day for longstanding Blizzard fans, but you could also say that it's overdue. The Battle.net name is a holdover from the days when GameSpy, TEN and other third-party services were virtually necessary to join online games for those players not intimately familiar with IP addresses. They lost their main reason for being when many games started treating multiplayer as a central feature, and broadband internet access made it almost trivially easy to find and join matches.