Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1991 by Allen Adham, Michael Morhaime and Frank Pearce. Headquartered in Irvine, California, Blizzard is best known for creating several major entertainment franchises including Warcraft (and World of Warcraft), Diablo, StarCraft, Hearthstone and Overwatch. The company also operates the Battle.net online gaming service and desktop client used to distribute, update and manage its games. Blizzard developed a reputation for high production values, long-lived live-service titles, competitive multiplayer and large-scale community events such as BlizzCon.

Over the years Blizzard has functioned as both a developer and publisher for PC and console titles and has integrated frequent updates, expansions and esports support into its business model. Blizzard merged with Activision in 2008 to form Activision Blizzard and, as part of that corporate lineage, became part of Microsoft’s gaming portfolio following Micro...