Blizzard Entertainment announced today that it will integrate Facebook into its online gaming service Battle.net. That means that players of the upcoming long-awaited StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty game will include the ability to tell your Facebook friends when you’re playing the game and what your doing in it.
The announcement shows how the social network is infiltrating the deepest parts of the hardcore game industry, which has been slow to adapt to the phenomenon of social gaming. But the integration shouldn’t be that hard for Blizzard to implement and it could make it a lot easier for gamers to find their friends and keep up with them in the game.
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is now in beta testing and debuts on the PC on July 27. Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard, has been working on the game for a long time. The first StarCraft, which debuted in 1998, sold more than 11 million copies and is still being played today.
With the Facebook integration, it will be easy to add Facebook friends to the friend lists in Battle.net, which users must sign into in order to play StarCraft II online. Paul Sams, chief operating officer at Blizzard, said that the integration with Battle.net means that future Blizzard games will work with Facebook as well.
It’s clearly a good move. I’m surprised that there aren’t more online games that have incorporated Facebook into their in-game communications, considering there are 400 million Facebook users. (Today, Sony Online Entertainment, a maker of massively multiplayer online games, launched a Facebook game to promote its new MMO: The Agency).
But it will introduce a very interesting change to online games. Heretofore, most online gaming has been anonymous. You create an online avatar and adopt a name, but it usually isn’t your real-world name. Now, with Facebook, you will know exactly who has been trashing you in an online match. Is that a good thing? Hopefully, Blizzard will manage this so you can have exact control over who you share your real-world identity with online.