Call of Duty Black Ops 4 to Be Battlenet Exclusive

The livestream reveal for Call of Duty Black Ops 4 certainly revealed a lot of new content, things that we’re very happy to see added to the franchise. Something that was not expected however, was the news that the latest addition will not be making its way to PC’s via Steam, but rather that it will become a Battle.net Exclusive.

"Those of us at Blizzard have been friends with Treyarch for many, many years. When it came to working on Overwatch, we consulted with Treyarch on a number of features," Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan said. "With all the features of Battle.net, I think it's going to be pretty amazing what Black Ops 4 is going to have to offer."

Treyarch has promised a full integration of the existing Battle.net social features, including the friends list and the cross game communication already enjoyed by fans of the other big non-Blizzard game on the platform, Destiny 2. The PC version is also said to support 4k resolutions and HDR, ultra-wide monitors, uncapped framerates, and the ever popular decision to have dedicated server support.

This will be the first time a Call of Duty game makes its way to Battle.net, though Destiny 2 has already broken a lot of new ground and proven that non-Blizzard games can function just as well on the platform. Activision has confirmed that Black Ops 4 will not be coming to Steam, which is itself a very bold move to make. Whether the ability to maintain tighter control over their product proves beneficial in the long run remains to be seen, but the ability to play Black Ops 4 with the backing of Activision and Blizzards own security measures, rather than relying on Steam, certainly gives a lot of hope for the process.