For a while now, Blizzard fans on PC have had to begrudgingly put up with Battle.net, the developer's very own launcher that it uses to boot up pretty much every game released by Activision Blizzard. It's a pain in the neck for any PC player to have to constantly download launchers for different games, but Battle.net is a particularly annoying example of a developer forcing its fans to put up with a subpar launcher when Steam is already installed on 90 percent of computers at this point.
Well, it seems like someone finally got the message, as it was recently announced that a number of Blizzard titles will be coming to Steam in the near future, starting with Overwatch 2 on August 10. Instead of having to run Battle.net in order to play the game, Overwatch 2 will now run directly through Steam itself if you choose to buy it on that platform, which will also make playing the game on Steam Deck a little easier to manage too.
It's worth noting that Battle.net isn't going away forever though, as Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has explained in a blog post on the developer's website that the platform will remain "a priority for us now and into the future". Ybarra doesn't mention which Blizzard games will be coming to Steam in the future, only that it will be a "selection", suggesting that the majority of Blizzard titles will still only be playable through Battle.net.
As for why Blizzard is only deciding to put its games on Steam now, the official reasoning is that the company has "heard players want the choice of Steam for a selection of our games", and that the decision was driven by player demand. The not so official explanation could be down to numbers, as it was recently revealed in some court documents from the recent FTC vs Microsoft trial that Microsoft considers Call of Duty's brief exclusive stint on Battle.net a "resounding failure".
In any case, more games available on more platforms is always a good thing, and I'm sure plenty of Steam users will be thrilled that they don't have to have their libraries split up as much starting next month. Hopefully, this is just the start of Blizzard's offerings on Steam, and that we see more popular titles available on the platform soon.