The service will remain the same, but Battle.net is being re-branded.
In a statement on the official World of Warcraft forums, Blizard has revealed that they will be moving away from using the Battle.net name.
"We're going to be transitioning away from using the Battle.net name for our gaming service and the functionality connected to it," says Blizzard. "Battle.net technology will continue to serve as the central nervous system for Blizzard games—nothing is changing in that regard. We’ll just be referring to it as Blizzard tech instead. You've already seen this recently with things like "Blizzard Streaming" and "Blizzard Voice," and more changes are on the way."
Blizzard elaborated on this decision by noting that Battle.net was originally conceived at a time when the idea of "including a tailored online-gaming service together with your game was more of a novel concept." As such, they based the name off of a website naming convention in order to easily relay to users what the service was about. However, over time they have noted that the branding of the company and the service have begun to gravitate apart from each other, and this has occasionally created confusion as it relates to the functionality and origin of the service itself.
As such, they have elected to unify the two brands.
The full statement makes it clear that the functionality of the service will not be altered in any way beyond whatever alterations would have been made to Battle.net in the form of content updates. Furthermore, the transition will be a gradual one that will occur in steps over the next several months. The first steps towards this re-branding have already begun as Blizzard's recently released "Blizzard Streaming" (a Facebook streaming service built into Battle.net) and "Blizzard Voice" (a chat client) have already started using the Blizzard name.
There is no word yet on when exactly the company plans to stop using the Battle.net name entirely.
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