Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California, best known for the franchises Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch and for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.¹³¹⁹ It operates as a division of Activision Blizzard, the interactive-entertainment company formed in 2008.¹⁵¹⁴ The company describes itself as a premier developer and publisher of entertainment software, and states its mission as “to craft genre-defining games and legendary worlds for all to share”.¹⁶¹³

The company was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Allen Adham?, Michael Morhaime?, and Frank Pearce?, three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles? School of Engineering who had received their bachelor’s degrees just a year earlier, in 1990.³¹⁵ All three were interested in electronic gaming, and the three were later honored by UCLA Engineering with its 2006 Professional Achievement Award for founding the studio.¹⁵³ Its earliest projects were conversions of existing titles for a variety of home computer systems, and it initially created games for Nintendo consoles before branching into PC games.¹⁵¹⁴ Early releases produced under the Silicon & Synapse name included RPM Racing and The Lost Vikings.²¹

The company changed its name to Chaos Studios and then adopted the Blizzard Entertainment label in 1994.¹⁴¹³ It found fame that year with the PC game Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, which introduced the Warcraft franchise that would later spawn the immensely popular World of Warcraft series in 2004.¹⁴

Growth and franchises

Over the following decade Blizzard established several enduring franchises. Diablo, an action role-playing series, debuted in 1996 alongside the online service Battle.net?.²² StarCraft, a science-fiction real-time strategy game released in March 1998, went on to become one of the most successful RTS games of all time.¹⁵ In 2004 the Warcraft setting gave rise to World of Warcraft, which became the world’s leading subscription-based MMORPG; at the completion of the Activision–Vivendi merger in 2008 it counted more than 10.7 million subscribers.¹⁴¹⁰ World of Warcraft was later an inaugural inductee into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play.²¹ The company maintained six major franchises — Diablo, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft — each of which receives updates at its annual convention.⁸

Diablo III, released in May 2012, had sold more than 30 million copies worldwide by mid-2015, a figure reported in the second-quarter earnings of Activision’s 2015 fiscal year.²⁵ It had already been the best-selling PC game of all time after passing 20 million copies — together with its expansion Reaper of Souls, which launched in March 2014 — a year earlier.⁵² Overwatch, a team-based first-person shooter and a new intellectual property, drew large numbers quickly after its 2016 launch: it reached 10 million players within about three weeks, 20 million by October 2016, 25 million by January 2017, 30 million by April 2017, and more than 35 million by October 2017.⁹⁴ The franchise later spawned the professional Overwatch League and, alongside Blizzard’s other titles, formed the basis for esports grand finals staged at the company’s convention.⁴⁸

Blizzard Entertainment - Official ‘The Next Chapter’ TrailerIGN

Corporate ownership

Blizzard came under the ownership of Vivendi Games, and in July 2008 Vivendi Games merged with Activision — the publisher founded in 1979 by former Atari programmers Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, David Crane, and Larry Kaplan — to form Activision Blizzard, with the combined company retaining the Blizzard name for the division.¹⁴¹⁰ The transaction, announced in December 2007 and closed on July 9, 2008, created what the parties described as the world’s most profitable pure-play online and console game publisher, with Vivendi holding roughly 52% of the new company on a fully diluted basis and about 54% of outstanding shares.¹⁰ Under the terms, shares of Vivendi Games were converted into approximately 295.3 million new Activision shares, and Vivendi separately purchased about 62.9 million newly issued shares at $27.50 apiece for roughly $1.7 billion in cash.¹⁰ Morhaime, a Blizzard cofounder, served as chief executive officer of the division, and Robert Kotick became president and chief executive of Activision Blizzard.¹⁰

In July 2013 Activision Blizzard agreed to buy back approximately 429 million of its shares from Vivendi for about $5.83 billion, or $13.60 per share, alongside a separate purchase of roughly 172 million shares by an investor group, ASAC II LP, led by Kotick and co-chairman Brian Kelly.¹¹ The deal ended Vivendi’s majority ownership and made Activision Blizzard an independent, publicly traded company; Vivendi retained a stake of about 12% while ASAC II LP held approximately 24.9%.¹¹ At that time World of Warcraft remained the world’s number-one subscription-based MMORPG, ending the second quarter of 2013 with approximately 7.7 million subscribers.¹¹ Kotick noted that the 2008 combination had generated over $5.4 billion in operating cash flow, more than $4 billion of which had been returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends.¹¹

Within the larger corporate structure, Blizzard Entertainment operated as one of several Activision Blizzard businesses, alongside Activision (also known as Activision Publishing), King Digital Entertainment — the mobile developer behind Candy Crush Saga — Activision Blizzard Studios, and Major League Gaming, which the company acquired in 2016.¹⁴¹⁹ Activision Blizzard was later the subject of Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion acquisition, a deal that raised competition concerns among regulators.¹⁴

Conventions and later turmoil

Blizzard holds an annual convention, BlizzCon?, first staged in 2005 and held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, at which it makes many of its major announcements and hosts most of its esports grand finals.⁸ Attendees may buy admission in person or purchase a Virtual Ticket, which grants access to panels and the closing ceremony; the 2019 edition featured concerts by Train, Lindsey Stirling, and Kristian Nairn.⁸ The convention was where the reveal of the mobile game Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon 2018 drew a strongly negative reception from fans expecting a mainline sequel to Diablo.¹⁸

Beginning around 2018 the company’s public reputation was shaken by a series of controversies, a marked shift for what had been regarded as PC gaming’s darling developer.¹ Cofounder Morhaime stepped down after 27 years in 2018, replaced as president by J. Allen Brack, previously World of Warcraft’s executive producer.¹ Player discontent over the 2018 World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth — centered on new systems such as Azerite Armor and a perceived lack of communication from the development team — prompted game director Ion Hazzikostas to publicly apologize on Reddit.¹ The turmoil culminated in a 2021 lawsuit filed by the state of California alleging sexual harassment, discrimination, and a “frat boy” workplace culture.¹¹⁴

By the mid-2020s the company was headquartered at 1 Blizzard Way in Irvine, California, and maintained offices in cities including Austin, Albany, Versailles, Seoul, and Singapore.¹³ It described its franchises as spanning Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and StarCraft, and reported having created games for millions of players over more than 30 years.¹³