Well, "soon" in Blizzard's language. More info here:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3267-Battle-net-Desktop-Client

The aim of it is to introduce the social and web features of Battle.net outside the official websites and games, and to integrate the patching experience to be consistent across all Battle.net 2.0 games.

EDIT: It would be great if it also has support for Wowhead and WoWDB, thus bringing the full WoW experience into one client (rather than having to open dozens of tabs in IE to read information / comments about objects present in the game). In addition, being able to stream games directly through it would be great for those StarCraft 2 matches and long-time WoW / D3 streamers.

Hope it's optional, though I doubt it will be. Do not want.

Ahhh, I remember having so much fun in the old days with all the myriad of custom maps on WC3 BNet, so many obscure but really creative custom maps, it was great finding a game open for one of those maps.

It kinda sucked though after DOTA took over, however that zombie map with all the total conversation modes/guns was pretty good.

It is an improvement compared to what is currently available. You have 3 separate launchers for WoW, SC2 and D3, all using different versions of a background client "Agent.exe" that's located in systemdrive/programdata/battle.net/agent.

So, they are consolidating this into one package and adding features to it. Not sure about required / optional yet, as the launchers currently in use are not needed for playing the games, but they are needed for patching them. Remains to be seen, I guess.

It's an improvement for some people I'm sure. I personally don't play all three games which require launchers regularly, and neither I imagine do a lot of people. I have no need for most of the extra features speculated on MMO-C/comments that they would add to the new launcher and I can't really see how a forced consolidated client would be anything but bloat for me.

As you said it remains to be seen, so I'll just wait to see how it works out before condemning it.

This launcher I was talking about is actually the window that shows up, which has a big PLAY button, when you launch one of the shortcuts for whatever Battle.net 2.0 game you have. Patches and hotfixes are distributed through it, too. Meaning, you already have at one launcher (each game comes with one).

So I'd imagine, the unified app would be distributed with the games, and instead of using those launchers (which would be removed in a future patch for each game in particular), you'd use this one. In a way, kind of removing bloat, when you think about it.

But then, I know as much as you. We'll see in time. :)

Kind of feels like a Steam competitor in its early stages. I wouldn't be surprised if they branched out to offer games once they get this stable on their own.

I'll be fine with it if they make the login process part of the launcher like Steam does. I hate that I have to login to Starcraft 2 every time I start the game and the damn thing doesn't remember my login.

Thanks for the heads up. Will be interesting to see what direction it heads in.

^ ^ I agree that'll be nice if launcher handles the log-in component for all games too. Good news and makes sense for them to do this.

According to the people in beta it's exactly like that. It's a single sign-on client, so once you're signed in to that you do not need to also sign in to the games when you launch them. This also means that it's mandatory, however, since the login process will be removed from the game clients themselves.