Blizzard’s Battle.net Quietly Opens Its Doors

Putting a marquee third-party RPG like Cyberpunk 2077 on Battle.net is a first that carries real weight. The launcher has historically sold Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, StarCraft, and the Call of Duty catalogue since the Microsoft acquisition — but never a genuinely competing single-player RPG from an outside studio. Onboarding CD Projekt’s flagship signals that Blizzard wants Battle.net to be a place players open even when there is no new Diablo season to grind.

The “for some reason” reaction is fair on the surface — most players already own Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam or GOG. But storefront strategy is rarely about the first sale. It is about foot traffic, install base, and giving an audience a reason to keep an account active. A launcher with only your own games is a cost center; a launcher other publishers want to be on is a platform.

Geralt in Diablo 4: Crossovers as a Growth Engine

The Geralt addition to Diablo 4 is the sweetener that makes the deal legible to players. Guest characters and cosmetic crossovers have become one of live-service gaming’s most reliable engagement levers, and dropping The Witcher’s most recognizable face into Sanctuary is designed to pull lapsed players back for a season. It also deepens the relationship between two of PC gaming’s biggest names — Blizzard and CD Projekt — in a way that could seed more collaborations down the line, especially with The Witcher 4 already running on PC and consoles.

There is a neat symmetry here for CD Projekt too. Cyberpunk 2077 famously stumbled badly at launch before a multi-year comeback turned it into a redemption story. Every new storefront it lands on is another chance to sell the polished version of a game that once defined the phrase “over-promised.”

What a More Open Battle.net Means for the Storefront Wars

Steam still owns the PC market, and Epic has spent billions buying its way into relevance with free games and exclusives. Blizzard entering the multi-publisher conversation from a position of an already-huge, already-installed launcher is a different playbook — it doesn’t need to acquire an audience, it needs to convince other publishers that audience is worth reaching. If the Cyberpunk experiment converts, expect more third-party listings, more crossovers timed to Blizzard’s long Diablo 5 runway, and a launcher that starts to look like a real retail competitor rather than a first-party utility.

For entrepreneurs and product people, the lesson is clean: the most valuable asset a platform owns is a reason for users to open it. Blizzard has millions of accounts and a habit loop built on seasons and battle passes. Renting that attention to outside publishers — and borrowing their characters in return — is how a closed ecosystem becomes an open marketplace without spending a fortune to get there.

The Bottom Line

A single game on a rival launcher won’t reshape PC gaming overnight. But Cyberpunk 2077 on Battle.net, paired with Geralt swinging through Diablo 4, is the clearest sign yet that Blizzard sees its storefront as a growth business in its own right. Watch what shows up next — the second and third third-party listing will tell you whether this was a stunt or a strategy.

Related on BizzNerd

• Diablo 5 Release Date Set for Spring 2029 After BlizzCon Reveal
• The Witcher 4 Already Runs on PC and Consoles, CDPR Says
• Cyberpunk 2077: Failure of the Most Anticipated Game of the Decade

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An October Return for Night City’s Breakout Hit

Studio Trigger’s original series arrived with modest expectations and left as a cultural phenomenon. The new teaser sets up a return to the neon-soaked, ultra-violent world of Night City, and the confirmed October window means the sequel is closer than most fans dared hope. Netflix has learned that Edgerunners is a rare property that pulls in anime diehards, gamers, and casual viewers all at once — so pinning down a concrete date, rather than a vague “coming soon,” signals real confidence in the show as a tentpole release.

The Anime That Rescued a Broken Game

Here’s the part every entrepreneur and creator should study. When it launched, Cyberpunk 2077 was a disaster — a technical mess that became shorthand for overhyped, underbaked releases, a story we covered when Cyberpunk 2077 stumbled as the most anticipated game of the decade. Then Edgerunners aired in 2022 and changed everything. The anime sent players flooding back to the game, drove a massive sales resurgence, and rehabilitated a brand many had written off. It was one of the most effective turnarounds in modern entertainment, and it happened through a spin-off in a completely different medium. That success helped fuel a period of growth for the studio, which recently restructured CD Projekt Red into its whole company identity. The lesson is simple but powerful: the right adaptation can be worth more than any marketing budget.

Netflix’s Anime Land Grab

Edgerunners 2 didn’t arrive alone. The same Anime NYC block delivered a new look at the second season of the anime-inspired Blue Eye Samurai, a preview of the family-friendly Lego One Piece show, a teaser for Bass X Machina, and more. Taken together, it’s a clear statement of intent: Netflix is aggressively locking in exclusive anime as a core pillar of its content strategy. For a platform fighting to keep subscribers engaged, anime is a smart bet — it commands fiercely loyal audiences, travels across borders effortlessly, and produces the kind of cultural moments that dominate social feeds. Edgerunners is the crown jewel, but the wider slate shows Netflix is building a moat, not just chasing one hit.

Why This Matters Beyond the Fandom

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is more than a nostalgia play. It’s proof that the walls between gaming, streaming, and anime have collapsed into a single entertainment economy where a hit in one medium supercharges another. When the sequel drops in October, expect another spike of interest in Cyberpunk 2077, a fresh wave of merchandise, and renewed conversation about a franchise that refuses to stay down. For creators and businesses watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is clear: the smartest growth strategy might be the one that jumps mediums entirely.

Related on BizzNerd

• Cyberpunk 2077: Failure of the Most Anticipated Game of the Decade
• CD Projekt RED Is Now the Whole Company, Not Just the Studio
• The Latest Anime News and Reviews on BizzNerd

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Call it a causality chain: a sequence where each link seems reasonable on its own, but the start and end points have no business being in the same sentence. This is the story of how a pilgrimage became a genre convention.

Link One: A Monk Walks to India

Around the year 627, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang set out on a roughly 17-year journey from China to India in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures. He came home a legend, and his real account of the trip seeded something bigger than theology: roughly a thousand years of folktales, retold in writing and passed down orally, each version adding a little more myth to the historical bones.

That slow accumulation is the raw material for everything that follows. History became legend, legend became literature, and literature eventually became loot-drop fantasy — but it all starts with one determined traveller and a very long walk.

Link Two: The Monkey King and a Blonde Shortcut

In the late 16th century, those folktales crystallised into Journey to the West, a novel following the monk Tang Sanzang and his chaotic bodyguard, the Monkey King Sun Wukong. Fast-forward to the 1980s, and manga artist Akira Toriyama used the novel as the template for a new series — Dragon Ball — modelling his hero Son Goku directly on Sun Wukong, tail and all.

Then comes the detail that quietly rewired pop culture. As Dragon Ball leaned harder into battle-manga spectacle, Toriyama introduced the Super Saiyan transformation and drew Goku’s hair blonde and spiked — reportedly so his assistant would spend less time inking all that black hair. A labour-saving hack became one of the most imitated visual signatures in the medium. Spiky, gravity-defying, colour-shifting hair is now shorthand for “this character is about to get serious,” and you will find it on protagonists across countless RPGs and fighting games.

Link Three: From Spiky Heroes to Keanu

Here is where the chain does its final, gleeful leap. The archetype Toriyama helped codify — the stoic, unstoppable warrior with an iconic silhouette — is exactly the mould modern action heroes are poured into, and no one embodies it more completely right now than Keanu Reeves. The quiet intensity, the flowing hair, the sense that violence is a form of meditation: John Wick is, functionally, a live-action Super Saiyan who trades ki blasts for a pencil.

Games closed the loop for real. Keanu didn’t just inspire the archetype from afar; he walked straight into it as Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most talked-about PC games of the decade. A monk’s pilgrimage, filtered through a novel, a manga, and an inking shortcut, ends with Keanu Reeves headlining a role-playing game. Whoa, indeed.

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The Bottom Line

None of this is a coincidence, exactly — it is culture doing what culture always does, borrowing and remixing until the source is invisible. Journey to the West didn’t just influence a few games; it helped define what a hero looks like, from a monk’s staff to a Super Saiyan’s spikes to Keanu’s stubble. The next time a spiky-haired protagonist powers up on your screen, remember you are looking at the tail end of a 1,400-year-old game of telephone. And honestly, that lineage is more impressive than most origin stories the games themselves bother to write.

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How a 24-Year Split Between Parent and Studio Finally Ended

CD Projekt was founded in 1994 as a game distributor in Poland. It was never a studio — it was the business wrapper around one. In 2002, the company created an internal development arm called CD Projekt RED, and that division became the team responsible for building The Witcher franchise and, later, Cyberpunk 2077.

For over two decades, two names coexisted. “CD Projekt” meant the listed holding company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. “CD Projekt RED” meant the developer. Journalists, investors, and fans often used them interchangeably, but technically they were different entities. The parent owned the studio. The studio made the games.

The shareholder vote changed that structure. Management’s stated reason was brand consistency — specifically, making the company easier to identify with its products on the global market and improving its position when recruiting international talent. The company’s own resolution language pointed to the fact that the parent and the development arm had been sharing the same core activities: game development, publishing, and IP management. Keeping two names for essentially one business was creating noise rather than clarity.

GOG Is Gone, and That Makes This Rebrand Make Sense

The name change does not happen in a vacuum. At the end of 2025, CD Projekt sold the GOG digital storefront back to its founder, Michał Kiciński, for $25 million. GOG had been part of the group for years, but the platform had drifted from the studio’s direction. The sale was a clean separation.

With GOG out of the picture, the remaining business is almost entirely about making games and managing intellectual property. The Witcher 4 is in active development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S out of the Warsaw studio. A sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is in development at CD Projekt RED’s Boston office. There are two additional projects in earlier stages — Project Sirius and Project Hadar.

A holding company called CD Projekt that owned a studio called CD Projekt RED made logical sense when you also had GOG in the group. Strip that out, and the two-name structure stops making business sense. Renaming the parent to match the studio is the cleaner move. The brand the world recognizes is CD Projekt RED. Now the listed entity carries that same name.

Where the Confusion Creeps Back In

Here is the wrinkle. For years, anyone who followed the gaming industry learned to use “CD Projekt RED” specifically for the development studio. The parent was “CD Projekt.” That distinction actually helped in some contexts — investors reading financial disclosures, journalists covering corporate news, and industry watchers tracking studio headcount versus holding company structure.

Now, “CD Projekt RED” covers everything. The listed entity. The Warsaw studio. The Boston studio. All of it. That merger of names removes a layer of specificity that served a purpose. If you are talking about the Warsaw team working on The Witcher 4 specifically, versus the broader corporate entity with multiple studios and projects, you now have fewer words to make that distinction.

From a pure branding standpoint, this is a strategic win. Most consumers never tracked the parent-studio split. They knew CD Projekt RED as the maker of their favorite games, and now the company’s stock listing and press releases carry that same name. Recruitment, global marketing, and investor communications all get cleaner.

From an industry-tracking standpoint, a subtle layer of corporate clarity disappears. That is a small trade-off for a company whose audience cares far more about The Witcher 4 than its holding structure — but it is worth naming.

The bigger signal here is strategic focus. CD Projekt RED is now a leaner organization with a clear identity, two active studios, and four projects in the pipeline. The rebrand does not change a single line of game code, but it does reflect a company that sold its non-core asset, unified its brand, and pointed everything toward the next generation of its franchises. For a studio that spent years managing a complicated post-Cyberpunk 2077 launch, that kind of structural clarity is not nothing.

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Fake gameplay footage of Cyberpunk 2077

Ever since CD Projekt released its first teaser trailer for Cyberpunk, everyone was pumped. The game saw huge hype around it. After around 5 years, the company uploaded 40 minutes of official gameplay. The controversy though is that it was completely fake. A lot of fans thought of the video as something that is too good to be true. That was unfortunately the case. For ‘’ work in progress,’’ it seemed perfect and visually appealing. People really thought that this game would be the best game ever. Only to encounter a game filled with bugs and glitches that look like this:

Overrated garbage

The marketing team had players believe that every little choice you make in the game will have an impact on your storyline and that no players will be the same as you due to there being plenty of choices. It was supposed to be an RPG in the true sense. This did not happen. In fact, CD Projekt Red was so embarrassed that they changed the Cyberpunk Twitter bio from ‘’RPG’’ to ‘’Open world action game’’.
At certain points in the story, the game makes it seem as If the choice you make will make a lasting difference.

During the mission with Meredith Stout, she gives you a chip. You then give it to Royce. It Turns out that the chip was bugged and you end up having an all-out brawl. Outside the building, she Is waiting and tells you that she’d like to do business with you. The only business that you can do with Meredith, after that, is to make love.
If you have chosen the latter option and decided to wipe out the virus before giving it – The same thing happens. You have a fight and again she waits for you with the same option. Countless examples of such scenarios exist in the game and are one of the reasons it shouldn’t be considered an RPG.

Sony removing Cyberpunk 2077

An event that shocked everybody is when Sony Entertainment decided to remove the game completely and give out refunds to everyone who purchased it. Even though Cyberpunk was extremely bad – Featuring many bugs and glitches along with promises that were not fulfilled, no one expected Sony to make such a drastic decision.

In conclusion

Cyberpunk 2077 had so much potential and so much hype built around it. Just imagine what this game could have done if it actually provided and came through with its promises. It could have impacted not just the RPG sector of gaming, but the whole gaming industry as well. Unfortunately, though, the game plummeted.

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Here is the list of top 10. highly anticipated games in 2019.

Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare®

Release date : 25. october 2019

Developer : Activision

Publisher : Activision

Platforms : PC , Playstation 4, Xbox Pone

A highly anticipated title of one of the most popular games ever is about to come out. It carries an old name ‘Modern Warfare’, like a prequel – but don’t let that fool you as this is absolutely new game that will only have simillar characters in it.

Halo: Infinite

Release date : TBA

Developer : 343 Industries

Publisher :  Microsoft Studios

Platforms  : PC, Xbox One

We are all pumped up to hear more about this new Halo title.  We are hungry for more information ASAP. Microsoft and 343 developers are keeping things very low key for time being and all we know that it is going to be a New Halo game. „We still have a long way to go until we ship the game, so things will certainly evolve between now and the release of Halo Infinite, though the engine demo is a clear indication of the direction we are heading with our next game and a great snapshot of where our tech is right now.“, Lee wrote.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood 

Release date : 26. July, 2019.

Developer : Machine Games, Arkane studios

Publisher :  Bethesda Softworks

Platforms  : PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a standalone sequel to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus serving as a prelude to Wolfenstein 3. This game will be a solo or cooperative experience. Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the first modern co-op Wolfenstein adventure. Team up with a friend or play solo as one of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters and wield a powerful arsenal of new weapons, gadgets, and abilities to liberate Paris from the Nazis.

Cyberpunk 2077

Release date :  End of the 2019.

Developer : Mike Pondsmith

Publisher :  CD Projekt

Platforms  :  PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

From the creators of the Witcher 3, comes a new game – a story-driven, open world RPG of the dark future. It was announced way back in 2012., and it seems development has come to an end. It is a behemoth of a game, even bigger than the Witcher 3. With guns, a lots of guns. It’s a chaotic and fast-paced, but way less aggressive than, say, Doom – which is the next on our list.

Doom Eternal

Release date : July, 2019.

Developer : ID Software

Publisher :  Bethesda SoftWorks

Platforms  : PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Playstation 4

The release of Doom Eternal is getting closer and we will go To hell and back again. It seems that Doom Eternal will have everything we love about the series, dialled up to 11. We will be chasing demons all summer!

Dying Light 2

Release date :  End of 2019.

Developer : Techland

Publisher :  Techland

Platforms  : PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

Dying Light 2 is an upcoming survival horror action game . Gameplay is similar to original, and that means that players will have choices to make during the story. such as  fixing the water supply for normal citizens. However, every action will have consequences. And consequences is the thing we are most excited about.

Control

Release date : End of 2019.

Developer : Remedy Entertainment

Publisher :  505 Games

Platforms  : PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

From the developers of Max Payne comes the new game under the name Control. You will be playing as a Federal Bureau of Control, a goverment agency that is responsible for keeping interdimensional forces in-check.

Borderlands 3

Release date : 13. Semptember, 2019.

Developer : Gearbox Software

Publisher :  2K Games

Platforms  : PC, Playstation 4

Join us on a mayhem-fueled thrill ride with Borderlands. The original shooter-looter returns, packing bazillions of guns and a mayhem-fueled adventure! Blast through new worlds and enemies as one of four new Vault Hunters. Play solo or with friends to take on insane enemies, score loads of loot and save your home from the most ruthless cult leaders in the galaxy.

Watch Dogs Legion

Release date : End of the 2019.

Developer : Ubisoft

Publisher :  Ubisoft

Platforms  : PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

The game takes place in a near-future, dystopian version of London. It’s also rumored that the main character of Watch Dogs Legion is an NPC that you select. This means you can play as anyone, every individual you meet in the open world, has a full set of animations, voice over, character traits and visuals that are generated and guided by gameplay systems. Absolute freedom.

Ghost Of Tsushima

Release date :  End of 2019., Sometime in 2020.

Developer : Sucker Punch Productions

Publisher :  Sony Interactive Entertainment

Platforms  : PC, Playstation 4

Ghost of Tsushima will be a historical open world adventure that will take players back to Feudal Japan. Story focuses on samurai Jin Sakai, but you will also gather allies such as archer Masako.  A game will have a huge open world, specifically, the setting will be the large island of Tsushima, located off the coast of Japan. Altough this isn’t confirmed yet, it is suggested that the Ghost of Tsushima could very well go down the route of games such as Nier : Automata with dialogue entirely in Japanese alongside English subtitles.

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