Can you please release this game on steam already? No use of holding this amazing game hostage on Bnet Come on give us a steam release already. This is the last game blizzard has not really destroyed because they finally stopped supporting this game and thus saved it from getting bad.
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I think there may be some technical limitations. Microsoft clearly wants to allow players to play only with Steam account, you don’t need Battlenet at all if you want to play OW2. I am not sure if HOTS’s engine and servers support something like that…
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I guess even if you download a Blizzard game on Steam, they still force you to install their own launcher.
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Other than Diablo 3, 4, and Overwatch .5 there hasn’t been any additions.
I doubt there is a technical reason keeping them from releasing more games. More likely is that they just released them onto Steam to make Microsoft happy. That, or the negative feedback towards the games released, as well as lack of control, turned them off from releasing anything else.
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So one of the key things about the games that Blizzard has released on Steam is how they work from a content-ownership standpoint.
For Heroes of the Storm and most other Blizzard titles, things are done on a region-by-region basis. If I buy Sylvanas in Heroes, then I’m buying Sylvanas in Heroes in my region of play. If I go and play Heroes in another region, then I won’t have access to Sylvanas.
Some things do have cross-ownership, like if I buy Diablo 3, I own it in all regions, but inside of Diablo 3, I’m levelling up each region independently of each other.
For Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4, this is not the case, and all progression and ownership is global.
Is this something that could be solved? Yes, they could add in a pop-up box using Steam’s systems to select the region(which is able to be set to a default option), but that’s a clunky approach, and there’s already issues with that with some regions, like if I’m playing in Australia(which I do), then my personal expectation from other services is that if I’ve got a choice between NA and EU, I’d expect EU, because of PAL history, but for Blizzard titles, that’s actually not the case, and I actually should select Americas as my server. The Singapore server and Brazil server are also in the Americas region, but at least Brazil makes sense.
If we ever see Blizzard resolve this global progression and ownership problem, it’s a good sign that they’re possibly intending to launch the game on Steam, but till that point, I’d assume it’s business as normal. The real test will be for more popular titles, like Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, which are far more likely to have the development time put towards releasing them on other platforms.
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What does PAL stands for?
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It’s an old term for how television broadcasts used to work.
Back in the day, an easy way to define game versions was by region, PAL generally being Europe and Australia(other regions too, but I only paid attention to what was relevant to me, and this wasn’t always 100% accurate, as sometimes there were reprints that would update games). Now obviously things are more global, but it’s hard to break the idea of how you started to view things.
There’s also the fact that Australia doesn’t use American English, but British English(with some minor alterations), like we type colour, not color, and say mobile phone, not cell phone, and a bunch of other things, so it’s not too wild to expect that we should use the EU server for Heroes.
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Don’t see why they can’t just make it work on steam, as it’ll probably triple the playerbase at least and they can start supporting it again. It’s not like there are a lot of alternatives for the genre on steam and it’s already an amazing game with an active playerbase.
I understand your reasoning, but as you’re probably aware, I think the reason ANZ players were put under the “Americas” servers is due to latency. There is far less latency for ANZ players on the US servers, compared to the EU. It was the same in D3, I could be wrong, but I think that was the thinking behind it.
It makes sense for latency reasons that ANZ players and players on the Singaporean servers fall under Americas, due to lower latency compared to playing on the EU servers.
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