Blizzard Entertainment

​​​​​​​​Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California, founded on 8 February 1991 by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse, a trio of UCLA graduates who initially focused on porting games for other companies before pivoting to original development. The studio was renamed Chaos Studios briefly in 1993, before settling on Blizzard Entertainment in 1994 following its acquisition by Davidson & Associates. 

That same year it released the first Warcraft game, launching one of the most successful real-time strategy franchises in the history of the genre. A further series of ownership changes followed: Blizzard became part of Vivendi Universal Games in 1998, was absorbed into the newly formed Activision Blizzard in 2008, and came under Microsoft ownership in October 2023 as part of Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. Blizzard continues to operate as a largely independent entity within the Xbox division.

The studio's output across three and a half decades has defined multiple genres. Warcraft and StarCraft established real-time strategy as a mass-market form; Diablo created the action RPG genre as it is still understood today, with Diablo IV (2023) selling over 12 million copies in its first five days; and World of Warcraft, launched in 2004, became the definitive massively multiplayer online RPG, peaking at 12 million subscribers in 2010 and continuing to operate across Retail, Classic, and the newly announced WoW Forever as of 2026. 

Overwatch, launched in May 2016, brought Blizzard into the hero shooter space and surpassed 50 million players within its first year, with Overwatch 2 transitioning the franchise to a free-to-play model in October 2022. Hearthstone, the digital collectible card game released in 2014, has accumulated over 100 million registered players. The studio laid off approximately 1,900 employees in early 2024, part of a broader Microsoft-driven restructuring across the Activision Blizzard portfolio.