Blizzard is putting Overwatch 2 on Steam and promises more of its popular PC games will follow in the near future. Blizzard made the announcement in a new blog post and outlined how the process will work when Overwatch lands on Steam on Aug. 10, 2023, which is basically “the same way you normally play Overwatch 2, but with Steam achievements now.”
You’ll still need a Battlenet account to get started, which Blizzard says helps make cross-play possible, and you can invite your Steam friends to the multiplayer game in the same way to invite them to any other Steam game.
“It’s our goal at Blizzard to listen to players and try to exceed their expectations in everything we do,” said Mike Ybarra, President of Blizzard Entertainment. “While Battle.net remains a priority for us now and into the future, we’ve heard players want the choice of Steam for a selection of our games, starting with Overwatch 2 on August 10th. We’re happy to work with Valve to make that happen.”
Valve founder Gabe Newell said Steam’s developers will “benefit from the effects of having the talented team at Blizzard helping us evolve our supported features and functionality for Overwatch 2,” though Newell didn’t say what features they might be working on.
Aug. 10, 2023, is also when Overwatch 2 season six starts, adding a new mode, a new hero, and the first round of paid story missions that take over from the canceled Overwatch 2 PvE expansion, albeit without new skill trees and other features planned for the PvE mode.
A month later, the Overwatch League teams will vote on whether to remain in the League, leave, or work toward something new.
Blizzard didn’t say which other games would end up on Steam or when – only that the team is continuing to look into which popular games might be a good fit.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
