Bungie shocked everyone yesterday when they announced that Destiny 2 would function on PC exclusively through Battle.net, the digital platform owned by Blizzard which is home to all their major titles. But a newly released Q&A by the Overwatch maker reveals that this deal is more an exception rather than a new chapter in their business. Destiny 2 is the only third party release they are planning to support immediately and in the long term.
The arrival of Destiny 2 to Battle.net not only means that the game will be sold exclusively through the platform, but it will also use Blizzard’s tools for communication and socialization. For example, players of the Bungie title will chat, add friends, and make groups the same way it is done with Overwatch or Hearthstone. And users playing the game at the moment will have an icon next to their user name, as it currently happens with Diablo III, World of Warcraft, etc.
As for the technical support of the game, Bungie and Blizzard will split the duties depending on each issue. For example, servers used for support online game will fall under Bungie’s responsability, while Blizzard will take care of login and social functions. The same will happen with costumer service questions, with Bungie taking those related to the game itself, and Blizzard doing the same with the issues regarding the Battle.net platform specifically.
The decision of supporting a third-party title in their own platform, says Blizzard, comes from the desire to help Bungie in the process of bringing the franchise to PC for the first time. The global infrastructure of Battle.net is the perfect tool that Bungie needs at this moment to avoid a long delay in the PC release in respect of the console version, and even with that it will probably still be arriving some time later.
But this deal requires so much work and attention from Blizzard that they wouldn’t be able to mantain their own strict standards of quality and customer service if they were to support other third party titles, so they are not planning any new third-party release soon or even in the long term.
- This article was updated on March 7th, 2018
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