Blizzard Introduces Live Facebook Streaming For Battle.net Games Like Overwatch, WoW And Hearthstone

Streaming is big business, and almost every developer and gamer wants in. For gamers, this couldn't be more true than with Blizzard's portfolio of games. Games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch are full of moments well-worth streaming, so in the latest version of Blizzard's own game client the company has built new streaming options right in.

Unfortunately for many gamers, Blizzard's streaming platform of choice is Facebook. While Facebook itself would love for its own social network to become the de facto place for streaming, it's a website that tries to cater to everyone and everything and thus it hasn't had great success attracting hardcore game streamers that don't care for all of the other noise on Facebook.

That could change, however, as it's clear that Facebook has been aggressive in pushing game streaming on its site. Given that Blizzard is a company that not only makes great games, but it full of gamers as well, we can only imagine it chose to go with Facebook after a little prodding. There's no denying that Twitch.tv is THE go-to game streaming site today, so to not have it supported in Blizzard's client in favor of Facebook, is questionable to say the least. Fortunately, Twitch gamers do have alternative recording clients to use, that work with just about any game, such as NVIDIA's ShadowPlay.

Nonetheless, if you are fine with streaming to Facebook, Blizzard's client will make it an easy endeavor. You simply need to title your stream, choose whether you want viewers to hear your mic, and configure a few other basic settings. Interestingly, if you look close at the client in the video below, you'll see "Streaming Platforms" with Facebook right beneath it. The pluralization of "platform" makes it sound like Facebook is just the first stop -- a very good thing if true.

If you want to take advantage of this streaming capability right now, you can, as long as you live in North or South America, Southeast Asia, Australia, or New Zealand. A broader roll out is also planned, but dates weren't available just yet.