"Overwatch 2" will be released on Steam on August 10, but Blizzard doesn't plan to stop there, promising that a "selection" of other games will appear on Steam in the future.

What a chaos! Can the immutable PC gaming laws really be that transformative?

While Blizzard and Valve never became rivals like Sega and Nintendo, Overwatch 2's Steam page is still as strange as Sonic's first appearance on a Nintendo console Battle.net was introduced long before Steam existed in Introduced in 1996, Blizzard was probably the last remaining company that could ignore Steam and not have everyone complain. Its legacy placed Steam in a category of its own.

A Battle.net account is required to play Overwatch 2 on Steam, and Steam and Battle.net players can play together; the Steam version of Overwatch 2 includes Steam achievements, and the Steam friend list friends from the Steam friend list.

Blizzard offers the following general explanation for this decision: Blizzard According to the company, the gaming community was more isolated in the 90s when Battle.net was launched, but now "the game belongs to everyone" and it is time to "break down barriers" that prevent players from discovering Blizzard's games.

"Battle.net remains a priority for us now and in the future, but we're hearing that players want Steam as our game of choice," said Blizzard's CEO, David Harris. We're happy to be working with Valve to make that happen."

The August 10 Steam release of Overwatch 2 will coincide with the launch of the $15 Overwatch 2: Invasion bundle, giving players access to new story missions, in-game currency, access to last year's new hero, Sojourn, and the Canadian access to the Railgunner's new Legendary skin.Blizzard recently canceled some of its more ambitious Overwatch 2 PvE plans.

Blizzard has not revealed which games will be released on Steam next, but says it will "share more about other games that may be coming to the platform when the time is right." [As with remasters like "Diablo 2 Resurrected" and "Warcraft 3: Reforged," "Hearthstone" seems like the obvious choice; Diablo 4 is a game that Blizzard doesn't have to give a portion of its revenue to Gabe at Battle. Net, which would be surprising given that it still seems to have a lot of momentum. Also, if Call of Duty's Battle.net exclusivity was really as big a failure as has been claimed, then maybe nothing is off limits.

"World of Warcraft" is the most surprising to me, not necessarily because it's a bad idea, but because seeing it on Steam is the kind of system that trips me up. Microsoft, which bought Bethesda a few years ago, is only a few signs away from completing the Activision Blizzard acquisition. (Microsoft is already shaking Bethesda: they say Starfield is less buggy than the usual Bethesda launches. A bold claim!)