Blizzard is a gaming platform that develops, releases, owns the rights to and manages many popular games. Their game catalogue includes World of Warcraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, Overwatch and StarCraft.
Many of these require a large time investment from players, and Blizzard’s games are based on a monthly subscription rather than a one-time purchase which means they can be expensive over the long run. You may find that you find it difficult to stop playing these games. For some people gaming can start interfering with their activities of daily life such as work, school and relationships.
This isn’t the case for most people however if you are someone who is addicted to gaming you may find deleting your account is the best way to start your recovery. There are other reasons you may wish to delete your account, maybe you want to finish the online RPG chapter in your life and fully commit to something new. It may also be that, you have recently realized the events that led thousands of users to delete their Blizzard account around a year ago and feel uncomfortable with the company’s ethics.
Luckily deleting your Blizzard account is relatively straight forward, and we will explain the process here. First, a little background if you didn’t already know!
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Why Did Thousands of Users Delete Their Blizzard Accounts at the Start of 2020?
In case you missed it, Blizzard lost a lot of followers at the start of 2020. As a matter of fact, there was no official way to delete a Blizzard account before this, and the company didn’t even have an option to disable an account.
The company attracted a lot of criticism following the ban of a player, alongside not awarding them price money for a tournament. The stated reason by the company was that the player had acted against company policy by supporting the Hong Kong protests.
Eventually following the massive outrage, Blizzard relented and gave the player his prize money and reinstated him on the site. However, this raised a few other issues with Blizzard’s policies such as there not being an official process for deleting or disabling accounts. The company has addressed this now, but in a rather ruthless way as you will discover in the next section.
Deleting Your Blizzard Account Step by Step
- Log into your www.battle.net account – you can click here to arrive directly at the support page
- Create a customer support request for “erasure” or “erasing all personal information”
- Blizzard may request proof of identity to ensure you are the owner of the account
- Once you have submitted the requested information it will take up to 30 days to delete your account.
The account can be deleted anytime within the 30-day period. There is no cooling off period and once the account is deleted this is a permanent act. All your information is irrecoverable, and if you wish to play any Blizzard games linked to your battle.net account in the future you will need to register a new account and repurchase those games.
If you change your mind and you are still able to login on your account, you should immediately send a request to customer service asking them to disregard the erasure request. This does not guarantee that your account will not be deleted. There is however a chance that this request reaches the customer support team in time to rescue your account.
Consequences of Deleting Your Blizzard Account
Deleting your Blizzard account unlike many other subscription services does lead to material loss on your part. In addition to Blizzard deleting their access to our personal information such as your name, contact information, security and payment details you lose access to the following forever according to battle.net:
- Purchase history
- Bought games, codes, promotions, and in-game items
- Game accounts and game progress
- Communications with Blizzard Customer Support
- Remaining Battle.net balance
Depending on how much time and money you’ve invested this may be a substantial amount. The good news is that you can rescue some of the loss by for example giving away previous in game items to good friends who want to continue playing.
Alternative to Deleting Your Blizzard Account
You can stop all your subscriptions and simply ignore the account. If you choose this option, you can keep your account details and gaming progress if you ever want to play again. This might be a good option for you if you are wanting to reduce your screen time and are able to stay off the platform.
