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Op-Ed: Steam Vs. Battle.net

By james_fudge

An interesting opinion piece on Tom's Hardware imagines what would happen if Blizzard decided to compete with Valve's Steam via Battle.net. Forget for a minute the fact that Blizzard has always maintained that it does not have any plans to do anything with Battle.net other than serve up its own content or that it has said emphatically that Battle.Net is different than Steam; imagine what would happen if the company decided to start serving up third-party content like Steam does.

With a rumored 25 - 30 million users worldwide (at the same level as Steam at 25 million), a 62 percent stake in the MMO market, 4600 employees, plans to integrate the service with Facebook and Real ID (identifies players in Battle.net by using real names), it is easy to see why Blizzard's service would be a serious challenge to Steam if it decided to start serving up games other than StarCraft, Diablo, Warcraft or World of Warcraft. Read More

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Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on June 28, 2010 (boomark / email).