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A gaming service provided by Blizzard Entertainment. Battle.net was launched on November 30, 1996 with the release of Blizzard's action-role-playing video game Diablo. Battle.net was the first online gaming service incorporated directly into the games that make use of it, in contrast to the external interfaces used by the other online services at the time. This feature, along with ease of account creations and the absence of member fees, caused Battle.net to become popular among gamers and became a major selling point for Diablo and subsequent Blizzard games. Since the successful launch of Battle.net, many companies have published online game services mimicking Blizzard's service package and the user interface.

Blizzard officially unveiled the new revamped Battle.net on March 20, 2009. It later revealed further details of the Battle.net revamped features at Blizzcon 2009 which will be supported by StarCraft II, Diablo III and World of Warcraft. The original Battle.net would also be renamed to Battle.net classic.

When the service initially launched with Diablo in November 30, 1996, Battle.net offered only a few basic services like chatting and game listings. Players could connect to the service, talk with other gamers and join multiplayer games of Diablo. Besides user account data, no game data was stored on the Battle.net servers. When a player connected to a game, they would be connecting directly to the other players in the game. No data was sent through the Battle.net servers. While this made the service quick and easy to use, it quickly led to widespread cheating since players using cheats could modify their game data locally. However, since there was an option to create private games, many players ended up playing with people they knew.

The release of StarCraft in 1998 increased usage of the Battle.net service significantly. Features such as ladder ranking and game philtres were added to the service. Battle.net grew even larger after the release of the expansion pack StarCraft: Brood War, with tens of thousands of players logged on at any given time (even in the present day). StarCraft Battle.net was especially successful in South Korea, where the number of players logged on was often many times that of the United States.

World of Warcraft initially did not support Battle.net, having separate accounts from Battle.net ones until the revamp of Battle.net on March 20, 2009 which forced players to merge their World of Warcraft accounts with the new Battle.net accounts. The features of Battle.net utilised in World of Warcraft include allowing players to engage in cross-realm, cross-faction and cross-game chat, which allows players to talk with their friends on their Real ID friends list, from other factions, other servers as well as other games such as StarCraft II and soon Diablo III. On November 11, 2009 Blizzard Entertainment made Battle.net a mandatory feature for World of Warcraft players.

Battle.net was revamped by Blizzard in 2009 and officially unveiled on March 20, 2009, it was further elaborated on during Blizzcon 2009. The new Battle.net contains three unique sections. The first allows players to connect all Battle.net accounts, World of Warcraft characters and friends list together and integrate them into a unified single Battle.net account. Players can also unlock achievements in-game which would in turn unlock avatars and decals which would be shown on the player's profile, the decals can also be seen in-game on the player's units.