Blizzard Entertainment: История и Настоящее

American video game publisher and developer

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded in February 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Their most recent projects include the online collectible card game Hearthstone; the multiplayer online battle arena Heroes of the Storm; the remaster of the original StarCraft and its expansion Brood War, StarCraft: Remastered; the replacement and sequel to the multiplayer first person hero shooter Overwatch, Overwatch 2; the ninth expansion for World of Warcraft, Dragonflight; and the sequel to Diablo III, Diablo IV. The games operate through Blizzard's online gaming service Battle. net. On July 9, 2008, Activision merged with Vivendi Games, culminating in the inclusion of the Blizzard brand name in the title of the resulting holding company. On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard announced the purchase of 429 million shares from the majority owner Vivendi, which resulted in Activision Blizzard becoming a completely independent company. Since 2018, the company's reputation has suffered from a series of poorly received games, controversies involving players and staff, and allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct against leading Blizzard employees. In October 2023, Microsoft acquired parent company Activision Blizzard, maintaining that the company will continue to operate as a separate business. While part of the larger Microsoft Gaming division, Blizzard Entertainment retains its function as the publisher of games developed by their studios. Blizzard Entertainment hosts annual gaming conventions for fans to meet and to promote their games: the first BlizzCon was held in October 2005 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, which is where all of their conventions have been held since. BlizzCon features game related announcements, previews of upcoming Blizzard Entertainment games and content, Q&A sessions and panels, costume contests, and playable demos of various Blizzard games. Blizzard WorldWide Invitationals were events similar to BlizzCon held in South Korea and France between 2004 and 2008.

Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, after all three had earned their bachelor's degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, the year prior. The name "Silicon & Synapse" was a high concept from the three founders, with "silicon" representing the building block of a computer, while "synapse" the building block of the brain. To fund the company, each of them contributed about $10,000, Morhaime borrowing the sum interest free from his grandmother. During the first two years, the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Ports include titles such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess. In 1993, the company developed games such as Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). Around 1993, co founder Adham told the other executives that he did not like the name "Silicon & Synapse" anymore, as people outside the company were confusing the meaning of silicon the chemical element used in microchips with silicone the materials used in breast implants. By the end of 1993, Adham changed the name to "Chaos Studios", reflecting on the haphazardness of their development processes. In early 1994, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for $6.75 million ($6.75 in 1994 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years million today). Shortly after this point, they were contacted by a Florida company, Chaos Technologies, who wanted the company to pay $100000 (100000.0 in 1994 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years) to keep the name. Not wanting to pay that sum, the executives decided to change the studio's name to "Ogre Studios" by April 1994. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard Entertainment shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a real time strategy (RTS) game in a high fantasy setting.

Blizzard Entertainment has changed hands several times since then. Davidson was acquired along with Sierra On Line by a company called CUC International in 1996. CUC then merged with a hotel, real estate, and car rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger. Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On line (which included Blizzard) to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard, at this point numbering about 200 employees, became part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi. In 1996, Blizzard Entertainment acquired Condor Games of San Mateo, California, which had been working on the action role playing game (ARPG) Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, with Blizzard's main headquarters in Irvine renamed to Blizzard South to distinguish the two. Diablo was released at the very start of 1997 alongside Battle. net, a matchmaking service for the game. Blizzard North developed the sequel Diablo II (2000), and its expansion pack Lord of Destruction (2001). Following these releases, a number of key staff from Blizzard North departed for other opportunities, such as Bill Roper. and led to further growth of the Battle. net service and the use of the game for esports. Blizzard started to work on a sequel to the Warcraft II in early 1998, which was announced as a "role playing strategy" game. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, the third title set in the Warcraft fictional universe, was released in July 2002. Warcraft III has inspired many future games, having the influence on real time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena genre. Many of the characters, locations and concepts introduced in Warcraft III and its expansion went on to play major roles in numerous future Blizzard's titles. In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles, The Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing and Blackthorne, from Interplay Entertainment and re release them for the Game Boy Advance handheld console. In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Vélizy, Yvelines, France. Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) based on the Warcraft franchise, on November 23, 2004, in North America, and on February 11, 2005, in Europe. By December 2004, the game was the fastest selling PC game in the United States, and by March 2005, had reached 1.5 million subscribers worldwide. Blizzard partnered with Chinese publisher The9 to publish and distribute World of Warcraft in China, as foreign companies could not directly publish into the country themselves. World of Warcraft launched in China in June 2005. By the end of 2007, World of Warcraft was considered a global phenomenon, having reached over 9 million subscribers In April 2008, World of Warcraft was estimated to hold 62 percent of the MMORPG subscription market. Blizzard's staff quadrupled from around 400 employees in 2004 to 1600 by 2006 to provide more resources to the game and its various expansions,

Blizzard established a distribution agreement with the Chinese company NetEase in August 2008 to publish Blizzard's games in China. The deal focused on StarCraft II which was gaining popularity as an esport within southeast Asia, as well as for other Blizzard games with the exception of World of Warcraft, still being handled by The9. The two companies established the Shanghai EaseNet Network Technology for managing the games within China. Blizzard and The9 prepared to launch the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King, but the expansion came under scrutiny by China's content regulation board, the General Administration of Press and Publication, which rejected publication of it within China in March 2009, even with preliminary modifications made by The9 to clear it. Rumors of Blizzard's dissatisfaction with The9 from this and other previous complications with World of Warcraft came to a head when, in April 2009, Blizzard announced it was terminating its contract with The9, and transferred operation of World of Warcraft in China to NetEase. They released an improved version of Battle. net (Battle. net 2.0) in March 2009 which included improved matchmaking, storefront features, and better support for all of Blizzard's existing titles particularly World of Warcraft. Having peaked at 12 million monthly subscriptions in 2010, World of Warcraft subscriptions sunk to 6.8 million in 2014, the lowest number since the end of 2006, prior to The Burning Crusade expansion. However, World of Warcraft is still the world's most subscribed MMORPG, and holds the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG by subscribers. In 2008, Blizzard was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the creation of World of Warcraft. Mike Morhaime accepted the award. Following the merger, Blizzard found it was relying on its well established properties, but at the same time, the industry was experiencing a shift towards indie games. Blizzard established a few small teams within the company to work on developing new concepts based on the indie development approach that it could potentially use. One of these teams quickly came onto the idea of a collectible card game based on the Warcraft narrative universe, which ultimately became Hearthstone, released as a free to play title in March 2014. Hearthstone reached over 25 million players by the end of 2014, and exceeded 100 million players by 2018. Another small internal team began work around 2008 on a new intellectual property known as Titan, a more contemporary or near future MMORPG that would have co existed alongside World of Warcraft. The project gained more visibility in 2010 as a result of some information leaks. Blizzard continued to speak on Titans development over the next few years, with over 100 people within Blizzard working on the project. However, Titans development was troubled, and, internally, in May 2013, Blizzard cancelled the project (publicly reporting this in 2014), and reassigned most of the staff but left about 40 people, led by Jeff Kaplan, to either come up with a fresh idea within a few weeks or have their team reassigned to Blizzard's other departments. The small team came upon the idea of a team based multiplayer shooter game, reusing many of the assets from Titan but set in a new near future narrative. The new project was greenlit by Blizzard and became known as Overwatch, which was released in May 2016. Overwatch became the fourth main intellectual property of Blizzard, following Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. In addition to Hearthstone and Overwatch, Blizzard Entertainment continued to produce sequels and expansions to its established properties during this period, including StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) and Diablo III (2012). Their major crossover title, Heroes of the Storm, was released as a MOBA game in 2015. The game featured various characters from Blizzard's franchises as playable heroes, as well as different battlegrounds based on Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch universes. In the late 2010s, Blizzard released StarCraft: Remastered (2017) and Warcraft III: Reforged (2020), remastered versions of the original StarCraft and Warcraft III, respectively. The May 2016 release of Overwatch was highly successful, and was the highest selling game on PC for 2016. Several traditional esport events had been established within the year of Overwatch release, such as the Overwatch World Cup, but Blizzard continued to expand this and announced the first esports professional league, the Overwatch League at the 2016 BlizzCon event. The company purchased a studio at The Burbank Studios in Burbank, California, that it converted into a dedicated esports venue, the Blizzard Arena, to be used for the Overwatch League and other events. The inaugural season of the Overwatch League launched on January 10, 2018, with 12 global teams playing. By the second season in 2019 it had expanded the League to 20 teams, and with its third season in 2020, it will have these teams traveling across the globe in a transitional home/away style format. In 2012, Blizzard Entertainment had 4,700 employees, with offices across 11 cities including Austin, Texas, and countries around the globe. as of 2015, the company's headquarters in Irvine, California had 2,622 employees.

On October 3, 2018, Mike Morhaime announced his plans to step down as the company president and CEO while remaining an advisor to the company; he formally left on April 7, 2019. Morhaime was replaced by J. Allen Brack, the executive producer on World of Warcraft. Frank Pearce announced he would be stepping down as Blizzard's Chief Development Officer on July 19, 2019, though will remain in an advisory role similar to Morhaime. Michael Chu, lead writer on many of Blizzard's franchises including Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch, announced he was leaving the company after 20 years in March 2020. On January 22, 2021, Activision transferred Vicarious Visions over to Blizzard Entertainment, stating that the Vicarious Visions team had better opportunity for long term support for Blizzard. Vicarious had been working with Blizzard for about two years prior to this announcement on the planned remaster of Diablo II, Diablo II: Resurrected, and according to Brack, it made sense to incorporate Vicarious into Blizzard for ongoing support of the game and for other Diablo games including Diablo IV. Vicarious was completely merged into Blizzard by April 12, 2022. In celebration of the company's 30th anniversary, Blizzard Entertainment released a compilation called Blizzard Arcade Collection in February 2021, for various video game platforms. The collection includes their three classic video games: The Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing, and Blackthorne, each of which containing additional upgrades and numerous modern features. The lawsuit drew a large response from employees and groups outside of Activision Blizzard. In the wake of these events, Brack, one of the few individuals directly named in the suit, announced he was leaving Blizzard to "pursue new opportunities", and will be replaced by co leads Jen Oneal, the lead of Vicarious Visions and the first woman in a leadership role for the company, and Mike Ybarra, a Blizzard executive vice president. Oneal announced in November 2021 that she would be leaving the company by the end of 2021, leaving Ybarra as the sole leader of Blizzard. As a result of the California lawsuit and of delays and release issues with their more recent games, Activision Blizzard's stock faced severe pressure. Subsequently, Microsoft seized the opportunity to become one of the largest video game companies in the world and announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard and its subsidiaries, including Blizzard, for $68.7 billion in January 2022. This exchange marks the largest acquisition in tech history, surpassing the $67 billion Dell EMC merger from 2016. The deal closed on October 13, 2023, and Activision Blizzard moved into the Microsoft Gaming division. Blizzard acquired Proletariat, the developers of Spellbreak, in June 2022 as to help support World of Warcraft. The 100 employee studio remained in Boston but will shutter Spellbreak as they move onto Warcraft.

Ahead of their license renewal in January 2023, Blizzard (via Activision Blizzard) and NetEase stated in November 2022 that they had been unable to come to an agreement on the renewal terms for their license, and thus most Blizzard games will cease operations in China in January 2023 until the situation can be resolved. According to a report by The New York Times, several factors influenced Activision Blizzard's decision to terminate the agreement, which included stronger demands made by the Chinese government to know of Activision Blizzard's internal business matters, NetEase's desire to license the games directly rather than run the license through a joint venture, and Activision Blizzard's concerns that NetEase was trying to start their own ventures, including the $100 million payment towards Bungie in 2018. NetEase was further concerned about the impact of the pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft. Activision Blizzard stated they were looking to other Chinese firms as replacements for NetEase as to restore their games in China. By April 2024, Blizzard, with Microsoft's help, and NetEase had agreed to new publishing terms, with plans to bring back Blizzard's games to China by mid 2024, maintaining all prior game ownership from the original publishing deal. Under this new deal, NetEase also will be able to bring games to the Xbox platform. Following completion of the acquisition, Microsoft announced it was laying off 1,900 staff from Microsoft Gaming on January 25, 2024. Alongside this, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra and Chief Design Officer Allen Adham announced they would be leaving the company. Further, the planned survival game from Blizzard was canceled. On January 29, 2024, Johanna Faries, the former general manager of the Call of Duty series, was named Blizzard Entertainment's new president, taking office on February 5.

Blizzard Entertainment has developed 19 games since the inception of the company in 1991.