Blizzard to Steam Migration, how it will affect the API

There's been some questions lately about what's going to happen from an API perspective when the Blizzard-to-Steam Migration occurs (soon(tm)).

Fortunately, from an API perspective the answer is "not a lot".

Before Shadowkeep launches, we'll encourage players to link their Steam profile through Bungie.net if they have a Blizzard membership.

When Shadowkeep goes live, a migration process is going to take anyone who has done that linking and preserve their original membership ID from Blizzard (thus keeping all of your historical stats etc), but is going to change the membershipType of that Membership to 3 (TigerSteam).

Any users who did not link a Steam account before Shadowkeep goes live will have the membership type changed once they link a Steam account, and until then the old membership ID of yet-to-be-migrated accounts will retain a membership type of 4 (TigerBattleNet).

Since the membership type returned will be consistent for any calls to services such as GetLinkedProfiles, this will mean that the transition should be seamless for you. The only users who will likely experience issues will be those who are treating the Membership Type as an identifying field for accounts. But as with the Cross Save warnings, you should move away from using Membership Type as an identifying field for a Profile if you are doing so: the Membership ID is the only identifier you need to uniquely identify a Destiny Profile when you're storing your own information.

There's a lot more happening under the surface etc, but from an API perspective this is all you'll have to worry about. Hopefully this should make the transition as painless as possible for those of you concerned about the Blizzard-to-Steam migration process.