Blizzard Entertainment

ISAAC KOH ZHAO JIN

Blizzard Entertainment

Dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences… ever.

- Blizzard’s Mission Statement

On 10 November 2015, Blizzard launched StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void - the concluding expansion of its StarCraft franchise first launched in 1998. Since its foray into games development in 1993, Blizzard has launched smash hit after smash hit, without a single game receiving negative reviews from gamers. Could Blizzard really do no wrong?

Based in Irvine, California, Blizzard Entertainment is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the 5th largest gaming company by revenue [1] and the largest games publisher in the world [2] with gross revenues of $4.41 billion and an operating income of $1.183 billion in 2014. As of 2012, the company had 6,690 employees with 4,700 in Blizzard Entertainment.

Since its foray into games development in 1993, Blizzard had launched 3 successful franchises that had gone on to become the bedrock of its success. It successfully navigated the shift from console games to PC games, the rise of the internet, rapidly evolving customer tastes and changes in digital goods. After over 20 years of success in games, with the rise of new technologies like smartphones and virtual reality, coupled with an increasingly fragmented customer and competitor base, what should Blizzard do next?

Company History

The Beginning of Video Games

On 27 June 1972, Atari Inc. was founded and on 29 November that same year introduced Pong, a table tennis-like game that could be played on a regular television set with an in-game paddle that could be controlled by an Atari-made console. Within a year, Pong had grossed more than $1 million in revenues, and the video game industry was born.

In his 1975 speech to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), co-found and then-President of Intel Corporation Gordon E. Moore gave the world Moore’s Law, forecasting that integrated circuits would double in performance every 2 years.

By 1984, video games were a $3 billion industry in the US alone. Performance of consoles also improved dramatically, enabling a superior quality gaming experience than the previous decade.

In 1985, Nintendo, which introduced its 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), followed by Sega with its 8-bit Master System in 1986, displaced Atari as the leading console maker. Whilst Sega had focused more on technological improvement, Nintendo’s focus on the development of quality games and characters (such as Super Mario) gave it the lead over Sega. By 1990, Nintendo sold over 19 million NES units and could be found in over a third of households in the US and Japan [3].