Blizzard Entertainment in the context of "World of Warcraft"

Activision Blizzard, Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Santa Monica, California. Activision Blizzard currently includes three operating units: Activision, Blizzard Entertainment and King.

Founded in July 2008 through the merger of Activision, Inc. and Vivendi Games, the company owns and operates additional subsidiary studios, as part of Activision, including Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games. Among major intellectual properties produced by Activision Blizzard are Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Guitar Hero, Skylanders, Spyro, Tony Hawk's, Diablo, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush Saga. Under Blizzard Entertainment, it invested in esports initiatives around several of its games, most notably Overwatch and Call of Duty. Activision Blizzard's titles have broken a number of release records. As of March 2018, it was the largest game company in the Americas and Europe in terms of revenue and market capitalization.

Xbox is a video gaming brand that consists of four main home video game console lines, as well as applications (video games), the streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming, and online services such as the Xbox network and Xbox Game Pass. The brand is owned by Microsoft Gaming, a division of Microsoft.

The brand was first introduced in the United States in November 2001, with the launch of the original Xbox console. The Xbox branding was formerly, from 2012 to 2015, used as Microsoft's digital media entertainment brand replacing Zune. In 2022, Microsoft expanded its gaming business and reorganized Xbox to become part of its newly formed Microsoft Gaming division. Under Microsoft Gaming, Xbox's first-party publishers are Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media (Bethesda Softworks), and Activision Blizzard (Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King), who own numerous studios and successful franchises.

Microsoft Gaming is the video game and digital entertainment division of the American multinational technology company Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington and established in 2022. Its five development and publishing labels consist of: Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks (publisher of ZeniMax Media), Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King (the latter three are publishers of Activision Blizzard). It produces the Xbox video game consoles and services, in addition to overseeing production and sales, and is led by CEO Phil Spencer, who has overseen Xbox since 2014.

Prior to 2022, Microsoft had several different video game-related product lines, including Xbox hardware, Xbox operations, and game development studios. Microsoft Gaming was created with the announcement of Microsoft's plans to acquire Activision Blizzard to unify all of Microsoft's gaming groups within a single division. With the completion of the Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2023, Microsoft became one of the largest gaming companies, the third-by revenue and the largest by employment. The company has 500 million monthly active players across all gaming platforms.

On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The acquisition was completed on October 13, 2023, with its total cost amounting to $75.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft brought Activision Blizzard under its Microsoft Gaming business unit as a sibling division to Xbox Game Studios and ZeniMax Media. With it, Microsoft gained ownership of several franchises under Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King, including Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and Candy Crush. As of 2023, the acquisition is the largest video game acquisition by transaction value in history.

Following shareholder approval of the acquisition, the merger was reviewed by several national anti-trust bodies, with early approvals granted by the European Commission and China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), among others. The United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued formal challenges to the acquisition. Sony also criticized the merger, concerned that Microsoft would make the lucrative Call of Duty franchise exclusive to the Xbox platform, though Microsoft committed to non-exclusivity through 2033. The FTC withdrew its request after courts did not find their anti-trust compelling to block the merger, while Microsoft offered to offload its cloud gaming support for Activision Blizzard's games for ten years to Ubisoft to appease the CMA.

Diablo is an action role-playing dungeon crawler video game series originally developed by Blizzard North and continued by Blizzard Entertainment after the original North studio shut down in 2005. The franchise is made up of the four main games: Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo III, and Diablo IV. Expansions include the third-party published Hellfire, which follows the first game; Lord of Destruction, published by Blizzard and released after the second game; Reaper of Souls, which follows the third game; and Vessel of Hatred and Lord of Hatred, which follow the fourth game. Additional content is provided through story elements explored in other types of media forms.

Hearthstone is a 2014 online digital collectible card video game produced by Blizzard Entertainment, released under the free-to-play model. Originally subtitled Heroes of Warcraft, Hearthstone builds upon the existing lore of the Warcraft series by using the same elements, characters, and relics. The game is available on the Windows, macOS, iOS and Android platforms, featuring cross-platform play. It has been a critical and commercial success, with Blizzard reporting more than 100 million Hearthstone players as of November 2018, and the game has become popular as an esport, with cash prize tournaments hosted by Blizzard and other organizers.

The game is a turn-based card game between two opponents, using constructed decks of 30 cards along with a selected hero with a unique power. Players use their limited mana crystals to play abilities or summon minions to attack the opponent, with the goal of destroying the opponent's hero. Winning matches and completing quests earn in-game gold, rewards in the form of new cards, and other in-game prizes. Players can then buy packs of new cards through gold or microtransactions to customize and improve their decks. The game features several modes of play, including casual and ranked matches, drafted arena battles, and single-player adventures. New content for the game involves the addition of new card sets and gameplay, taking the form of expansion packs.

Heroes of the Storm is a multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. Announced at BlizzCon 2010, it was released on June 2, 2015, for macOS and Windows. The game features various crossover characters from Blizzard's franchises as playable heroes, as well as different battlegrounds based on Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch universes.

Matches are contested between two teams of five players, each aiming to destroy the opposing team's main structure, known as the "Core." The first team to do so wins the match, with a typical duration of around 20 minutes. Matches take place on various themed battlegrounds, each featuring unique level designs and secondary objectives, the completion of which grants significant advantages. Every player controls a single character, known as a "hero", with a set of distinctive abilities and differing styles of play. Heroes become more powerful over the course of a match by collecting experience points and unlocking "talents" that offer new abilities or augment existing ones, contributing to the team's overall strategy.

Overwatch (abbreviated as OW) is a multimedia franchise centered on a series of multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) video games developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Overwatch was released in 2016 with a successor, Overwatch 2, released in 2022. Both games feature hero-based combat between two teams of players fighting over various objectives, along with other traditional gameplay modes.

Released in 2016, the first video game in the series lacked a traditional story mode. Instead, Blizzard employed a transmedia storytelling strategy to disseminate lore regarding the game's characters, releasing comics and other literary media, as well as animated media that includes short films. The game enjoyed both critical and commercial success, and garnered a devoted following. The fan community around the franchise has produced a large amount of content including art, cosplay, fan fiction, anime-influenced music videos, Internet memes, and pornography.