Potential Future of Battle.net Launcher

Minecraft, Bethesda & Battle.net Launcher Icons.

With the debut of Battle.net Launcher through Open Beta on August 2013, young me "foresaw" the rise of individual launcher from other companies similar to Origin and Ubisoft Connect (at the time known as Uplay). This is a hot topic in the minds of many people for many good reasons, which can warrant a post of its own. Instead, I would like to look back at recent developments surrouding two launchers from the companies owned by Microsoft and what direction Battle.net can take once Activision Blizzard's deal will be finalized.

One Down.

This post was largely inspired by recent news about the discontinuation of Bethesda Launcher and migration of player's game libraries to Steam. Meanwhile they haven't really commented on the reasons as to why they decided to close their application, it's no secret that the platform wasn't really received well by public in around six years its existence. Even though I didn't had much of personal experience with it outside of claiming free copies of Quake trilogy games thanks to QuakeCon at Home and its charity efforts, even though I bought them on Steam a few weeks later anyway.

You know, at least I grabbed those free copies of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and Arx Fatalis for 25th and 20th anniversaries of The Elder Scrolls franchise and Arkane Studios respectively, which is good news since I would have more great games in my backcatalog that's more accessible to me. I guess it played out in favor of those who were as patient enough as me. Some people might assume that this decision actually came from Xbox directly. Personally, I believe this to be another representation of Microsoft's hands-off approach to their gaming companies. Although even their closer involvement with this type of thing doesn't seem to be as drastic as you might think. Kind of. I guess that's curious.

One To Go.

Meanwhile, the migration of Mojang accounts to Microsoft is still ongoing as of the writing of this "article". Announced back in October of 2020, this process was slowly starting overtime with the another big update to Minecraft launcher rolling out in November of last year. Previously being a home to only Java Edition and Minecraft Dungeons (also originally it was available through separate launcher), now this launcher also supports Minecraft: Bedrock Edition (also known as "Minecraft for Windows") for Windows 10 & 11 users.

All of these changes were made with the inclusion of both versions of Minecraft into Game Pass. That's generally a good thing, especially since there're whispers of this PC Bundle being available to purchase and offered to all Bedrock or Java users for free some time in the future. However, Mojang & Microsoft couldn't escape some technical difficulties that caused the obvious outcry from their audience. Not sure if you still can avoid using this new launcher in favor of older version as Java Edition is still supported on various Linus and Mac systems.

Conclusion.

What are the differences between Minecraft and Bethesda? Well, its obvious and leads to the reasons why Battle.net launcher managed to avoid the majority of criticism faced by other programs from different publishers & developers alike. There's a clear distinction between one game and one company with many different games. Companies with Mojang, Blizzard and Riot Games (for that matter) are serving rather "niche" player audience. While League of Legends was briefly available on Steam, World of Warcraft and other vast majority of titles from aforementioned companies were distributed by them exclussively on PC. Those came in much before "launcher plague" started to actually show off and the place they took helped them to avoid repercussions later on from the most part.

In case of Bethesda, they were much more "massive" in that regard. Many different games and series that were already available on Steam & GOG, which ended up rasing a lot of eyebrows and annoy many players around the globe. They haven't pushed it as hard as others outside of potential few exceptions I'm not aware of, so its easy to see them just looking back and asking themselves "what's the point?" Although that doesn't mean that existing Bethesda account that used for many of their games won't be integrated to Microsoft account some time in future. It took Mojang seven years, for what it's worth.

Many of Bethesda and couple of Minecraft titles were already available on Microsoft Store, which is also interesting. They don't seem to be interested in artificial competition with Steam. Release of recent Xbox Game Studios titles like Age of Empires 4 and Halo Infinite with migration of Bethesda Launcher library to Steam shows that Phil Spencer don't want to repeat the mistakes of Epic Games & Take Two, for example. What does it mean for Blizzard? We just know that this acquisition will go through: they're not Nvidia & Arm. Xbox's app could benefit from Battle.net, seeing how unhappy (to put it lightly) my friend's experience was with it when they used Game Pass.

However, I have doubts about transformation of Battle.net into new Xbox launcher. At first that outcome seemed obvious, but includion of new Minecraft Launcher to Microsoft Store spoiled the future events. At best, I expect Battle.net to follow the suit. What might seem more likely is migration of Activision games to Microsoft Store. Doing that migration would be relatively simple since (from what I understand) Activision games have their own account system going on, and so did Destiny 2 when Bungie jumped that ship. Can some Blizzard games that support only Windows 10 and higher, like Blizzard Arcade Collection, leave Blizzard's launcher exclusivity? In theory, yes. In reality, I suspect them act like Minecraft's Java Edition and other Blizzard titles that support older versions of Windows.