Epic Games hires former head of Blizzard's Battle.net

Epic Games has hired Martin Keely, previously the head of Blizzard's Battle.net, to serve as vice president and general manager of Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services. That puts a veteran of one of PC gaming's longest-running online platforms in charge of two pieces of Epic's developer-facing business: storefront distribution and the services layer that supports online play, accounts, and cross-platform connectivity.

For developers, the significance is less about a single executive move and more about what it signals. Epic has spent years trying to make its store and online services a more attractive alternative to building and maintaining your own commerce and backend stack. Bringing in someone with Battle.net experience suggests a continued focus on scale, reliability, and the operational realities of running a large PC ecosystem.

The exact scope of Keely's responsibilities beyond the title hasn't been spelled out, but the combination of store and online services under one leader is notable. Those systems touch everything from login flows and entitlement checks to matchmaking, patching, and live-ops support. Any improvements there can reduce friction for studios, especially smaller teams that rely on third-party infrastructure instead of rolling their own.

The move also reinforces how much platform competition now happens behind the scenes. Storefront features matter, but so do uptime, account management, developer tooling, and the ability to support games at scale over years rather than months. Epic appears to be betting that experienced leadership in those...