Overwatch in the context of "Blizzard Entertainment"

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.

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.

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.