Overwatch in the context of "Reinhardt (Overwatch)"

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.

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California, and a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. Originally founded in 1991, the company is best known for producing the highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (2004) as well as the multi million-selling video game franchises Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch. The company also operates Battle.net, an online gaming service.

Founded as Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce. The company began development of their own software in 1993, with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings, and changed its name to Chaos Studios, Inc. the same year, then to Blizzard Entertainment after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates in 1994; that year, the company released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, which would receive numerous sequels and led to the highly popular World of Warcraft. By the end of the decade, Blizzard also found success with the action role-playing game Diablo (1997) and strategy game StarCraft (1998). The company became part of Vivendi Games in 1998, which would then merge with Activision in 2008, culminating in the inclusion of the Blizzard brand name in the title of the resulting holding company; Activision Blizzard became completely independent from Vivendi in 2013. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023, 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.

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.

Mercy is the call sign of Angela Ziegler, a character who first appeared in the 2016 video game Overwatch, a Blizzard Entertainment–developed first-person shooter, and the resulting franchise. Voiced by Lucie Pohl, she is a Swiss doctor who provided key medical support for the original Overwatch group. In-game, she is a support-class hero who can heal, buff, and resurrect teammates.

The character is one of the more popular in the game, being noted by Blizzard to be the most played support character during the game's beta. However, her resurrect ability has been criticized in competitive and professional play levels, given the swing in momentum the ability creates. Her gameplay mechanics have undergone various reworks and patches in an attempt by Blizzard to make her a more well-rounded playable hero.

Tracer is the call sign of Lena Oxton, a character who appears in Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch franchise. The 2014 Overwatch Cinematic Trailer short was her first appearance overall. An April 2016 update for the crossover multiplayer online battle arena game Heroes of the Storm added her to its playable roster, marking her first inclusion in a video game. Shortly thereafter, she appeared in the first Overwatch game, a first-person hero shooter. She again appeared in its 2023 sequel, Overwatch 2.

In the Overwatch narrative, she is a peppy and energetic pilot of British origin. A damage-class hero in-game, Tracer has low health, but is highly mobile, being able to both teleport and time travel. Those abilities were caused by an accident that left her unable to maintain a physical form in the present until her friend and fellow Overwatch agent, Winston, invented the "chronal accelerator", a device that allows her to control her own time frame.

Sojourn is the codename of Vivian Chase, a character in the Overwatch media franchise. She first appeared in Overwatch 2, a first-person hero shooter video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, being added to game's playable character roster upon its early access release in 2022 and was voiced by Cherise Boothe. Initially designed by Arnold Tsang in 2014, Sojourn is a "Damage"-class hero that uses cybernetic enhancements to handle the recoil of her primary weapon; a railgun. In the franchise's lore, she is a Canadian soldier who serves at the rank of captain within the Overwatch team, previously working with Jack Morrison during the Omnic War and commanded agents or provided long-range cover.

Sojourn garnered mixed reception upon her inclusion, with critics praising her cybernetic design and representation of afro-textured hair, whilst others critiquing lack of uniqueness and lore in-game. Particular scrutiny was directed towards Sojourn as a representation of black female in videos, with critics deriding her inclusion as disappointing and bare-minimum; stemming from a long tracked history of criticism directed at Blizzard for the lack of black women representation in the franchise.

Brigitte Lindholm /brɪˈɡiːtə/ is a character who appears in the 2016 video game Overwatch, a Blizzard Entertainment–developed first-person shooter, and the resulting franchise. Added in a March 2018 update, prior to her in-game debut she first appeared in Dragon Slayer, an issue of the Overwatch digital comic series.