Select Blizzard Games Coming to Steam, Starting With Overwatch 2

Blizzard said it has banned Diablo 4 players who used a character realm transfer exploit that went viral late July.

Blizzard Entertainment is gearing up to release the sixth season of Overwatch 2 into the marketplace. If you’re eager to dive into the season, then anything marketing-wise might catch your attention. Well, it looks like one piece of marketing material managed to get out to the public before its actual scheduled release. The best part about this is that the actual president of Blizzard Entertainment was reportedly the individual responsible for the leak. Now fans are getting a quick peek into some of the upcoming season six skins.

Alliance Arts has announced it will be publishing The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily. Created by developers One or Eight (Lost Epic), WSS Playground (Needy Streamer Overload), and Alliance Art themselves, it’s a strange twist on a turn-based strategy and is coming to PC in 2024.

August is typically a month when sports titles dominate the video game launch calendar, but this year it is bookended by two franchises with long tenures and and huge fandoms: Baldur’s Gate 3 makes a full launch Aug. 3 after three years in early access, and FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6 arrives Aug. 25.

Keeping track of all the latest video games coming out is an increasingly complex task, what with multiple PC storefronts, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, mobile, and more to keep track of, but don’t worry, I’m here to help. Every month I'll be running down the games you need to be keeping an eye on, from the AAA headliners to the indies you might otherwise overlook.

The Destiny and Diablo communities went at each others’ throats on Twitter last month due to a comment made by a Destiny 2 developer who called out Diablo 4’s enemy scaling. He said that “it is one of the worst ideas in video games” and said that it takes away from playstyles and ruins power trips. Blizzard President Mike Ybarra responded with a simple “Lazy, huh.” but gamers on Twitter were divided over how games should adjust the difficulty.

It’s the battle of the free FPS games, as Valve’s Team Fortress 2 has briefly overtaken Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 in terms of concurrent Twitch viewers. With multiple reasons for the spike in viewers that overtook OW2, and the Blizzard shooter’s impending Steam release, it looks like it could be in for some friendly competition with Team Fortress 2 going forward.

Satellite communication via our phones is finally becoming a reality, and the feature has been out for some time. The latest iPhones support it, and well, it seems like our Samsung and Pixel phones also have support for it, and it will be going widespread once Android 14 is released. Once the update comes out, it will obviously require the right hardware and with that, the rest is up to the phone manufacturer.

Blizzard games will be coming to Steam, starting with Overwatch 2 on 10th August, giving PC gamers an option outside of Battle.net for where they buy and play their Blizzard games.

Blizzard is bringing a selection of its PC games over to Steam, starting with Overwatch 2. The free-to-play team-based shooter is headed to Valve's gaming client on August 10, in what appears to be a change in Blizzard's strategy due to its impending acquisition by Microsoft and the low player engagement the game has garnered in recent times. The Windows PC version of Overwatch 2 and other games from the publisher is largely restricted to its Battle.net launcher — a hot topic for most PC gamers, who prefer having all their games on one platform and hate having to juggle between them. The Steam version will also include the niceties of unlockable achievements and cross-platform multiplayer.

For a while now, Blizzard fans on PC have had to begrudgingly put up with Battle.net, the developer's very own launcher that it uses to boot up pretty much every game released by Activision Blizzard. It's a pain in the neck for any PC player to have to constantly download launchers for different games, but Battle.net is a particularly annoying example of a developer forcing its fans to put up with a subpar launcher when Steam is already installed on 90 percent of computers at this point.

Blizzard is taking its first tentative steps away from Battle.net exclusivity, starting with the launch of Overwatch 2 on Steam this August and the promise of more games on the way.