Online gaming is a big deal today, but it wasn’t always. In the beginning, before Steam was a thing, before Xbox Live had caught on, before Sony had even considered online, there was Blizzard. And Blizzard worked on Battle.net, their own online gaming service that is still used in all their games to this day, a service that defined what an online game service should have in its wake.
Now, Stardock- the folks who brought us the excellent Galactic Civilizations games, and the even more excellent Sins of a Solar Empire- have hired the one man who was perhaps the most responsible for Battle.net. You see, Adrian Luff, the man responsible for overseeing the growth of Battle.net during his 17-year tenure at Blizzard Entertainment, has now joined Stardock, where he will be helping them with Project Tachyon, something that will “manage the online infrastructure to provide the meta-game experience” for all of Stardock’s games. Tachyon will be integrated with Steamworks, and will run entirely from the cloud.
I can’t wait to see what kind of online functionality Stardock’s upcoming games have, with a man this visionary at the helm, but we’ll keep you posted on whatever it is. Stay tuned.