In a post to its World of Warcraft blog, Blizzard has announced that it will be retiring the Battle.net name for its online services, after twenty years. In the post, Blizzard stated:

When we created Battle.net, the idea of including a tailored online-gaming service together with your game was more of a novel concept, so we put a lot of focus on explaining what the service was and how it worked, including giving it a distinct name. Over time, though, we’ve seen that there’s been occasional confusion and inefficiencies related to having two separate identities under which everything falls—Blizzard and Battle.net. Given that built-in multiplayer support is a well-understood concept and more of a normal expectation these days, there isn’t as much of a need to maintain a separate identity for what is essentially our networking technology.

In the coming months, the company will transition to using the term ‘Blizzard tech’, which will encompass a wide variety of its online and game support services. This initiative has already begun, with recent services such as Blizzard Streaming and Blizzard Voice.

Blizzard will keep players updated as the changes progress through its ecosystem.