Thought this was very interesting. Avowed will be launching on PC on Xbox, Steam, and Battle.net.
This is an interesting experiment. Speaking as a person who plays a lot of Blizzard games I can attest to spending a lot of time in Battle.net. There’s a large and attentive playerbase on there that they’re going to get the eyeballs of. Personally, as a long-term Game Pass subscriber I’ll still be using the Xbox app to grab this and the Premium Edition upgrade, but I thought it was an interesting development in Xbox’s PC strategy.
I’m assuming it’s not just a matter of eyeballs, but also of avoiding the 30% cut that Steam takes for sales on that platform. Microsoft is obviously chafing at those kinds of fees, as evidenced by their eagerness to launch their own stores on Android and iOS, so this play makes a lot of sense.
It’s interesting, BattleNet is big but I thought if something like this would happen it would be with maybe Halo first, since the CoD and OW audience is majority there so they’d be more into fps multiplayer and the social system they have there would fit Halo tbh.
Of course they aren’t. Battle.net is well-like and very popular. The same could not be said of the Bethesda Store.
If you haven’t been paying attention the Xbox App team has been doing a ton of work to enable seamless integration of publisher/developer-specific launchers. This is how launching Riot Games games works, they launch through the Riot Launcher. Same with some Blizzard games too. The newly-added-to-Game Pass Starcraft Remastered and Starcraft 2 Campaign Collection launch ‘through’ Bnet (which sadly means they don’t come with Achievements). I think Diablo 4 works this way too.
It’s all about meeting publishers halfway to get their games on the Xbox app.
One thing I have always wondered is why aren’t Microsoft games on the epic game store. Anyways, this is interesting to see because more visibility is good
