45 Facts About Blizzard Arena

Blizzard Arena Entertainment, Inc is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California.

Since then, Blizzard Arena Entertainment has created several Warcraft sequels, including highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft in 2004, as well as three other multi-million selling video game franchises: Diablo, StarCraft and Overwatch.

On July 25,2013, Activision Blizzard Arena announced the purchase of 429 million shares from majority owner Vivendi.

In 1996, Blizzard Arena Entertainment acquired Condor Games of San Mateo, California, which had been working on the action role-playing game Diablo for Blizzard Arena at the time.

Blizzard Arena North developed the sequel Diablo II, and its expansion pack Lord of Destruction .

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Around 2000, Blizzard Arena engaged with Nihilistic Software to work on a version of StarCraft for home consoles for Blizzard Arena.

Blizzard Arena ordered Nihilistic to stop work on StarCraft: Ghost in July 2004, and instead brought on Swingin' Ape Studios, a third-party studio that had just successfully released Metal Arms: Glitch in the System in 2003, to reboot the development of Ghost.

Blizzard Arena fully acquired Swingin' Ape Studios in May 2005 to continue on Ghost.

Blizzard Arena decided to cancel Ghost rather than extend its development period to work on the newer consoles.

Blizzard Arena started to work on a sequel to the Warcraft II in early 1998, which was announced as a "role-playing strategy" game.

In 2004, Blizzard Arena opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Velizy, Yvelines, France.

Blizzard Arena Entertainment released World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game based on the Warcraft franchise, on November 23,2004, in North America, and on February 11,2005, in Europe.

Blizzard Arena partnered with Chinese publisher The9 to publish and distribute World of Warcraft in China, as foreign companies could not directly publish into the country themselves.

Blizzard Arena's staff quadrupled from around 400 employees in 2004 to 1600 by 2006 to provide more resources to the game and its various expansions, and Blizzard Arena moved their headquarters to 16215 Alton Parkway in Irvine, California in 2007 to support the additional staff.

The inaugural event drew about 6,000 people and became an annual event which Blizzard Arena uses to announce new games, expansions, and content for its properties.

Blizzard Arena established a distribution agreement with the Chinese company NetEase in August 2008 to publish Blizzard Arena's games in China.

Blizzard Arena established a few small teams within the company to work on developing new concepts based on the indie development approach that it could potentially use.

Blizzard Arena continued to speak on Titans development over the next few years, with over 100 people within Blizzard Arena working on the project.

However, Titans development was troubled, and, internally, in May 2013, Blizzard Arena cancelled the project, and reassigned most of the staff but left about 40 people, led by Jeff Kaplan, to either come up with a fresh idea within a few weeks or have their team reassigned to Blizzard Arena's other departments.

The new project was greenlit by Blizzard Arena and became known as Overwatch, which was released in May 2016.

Several traditional esport events had been established within the year of Overwatch release, such as the Overwatch World Cup, but Blizzard Arena continued to expand this and announced the first esports professional league, the Overwatch League at the 2016 BlizzCon event.

In 2012, Blizzard Arena Entertainment had 4,700 employees, with offices across 11 cities including Austin, Texas, and countries around the globe.

Michael Chu, lead writer on many of Blizzard Arena's franchises including Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch, announced he was leaving the company after 20 years in March 2020.

On January 22,2021, Activision transferred Vicarious Visions over to Blizzard Arena Entertainment, stating that the Vicarious Visions team had better opportunity for long-term support for Blizzard Arena.

In celebration of the company's 30th anniversary, Blizzard Arena Entertainment released a compilation called Blizzard Arena Arcade Collection in February 2021, for various video game platforms.

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The deal is expected to close by mid-2023, during which Activision Blizzard Arena will remain its own company and, once finalized, will be moved into the Microsoft Gaming division.

Blizzard Arena acquired Proletariat, the developers of Spellbreak, in June 2022 as to help support World of Warcraft.

Blizzard Arena Entertainment has developed 19 games since 1991, the majority of which are in the Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft series.

Additionally, Blizzard Arena has released two spin-offs to the main franchises: Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm .

Currently, Blizzard Arena Entertainment has four main franchises: Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch.

Blizzard Arena announced in 2006 that they would be producing a Warcraft live-action movie.

In 2015, Blizzard Arena Entertainment formed "Classic Games division", a team focused on updating and remastering some of their older titles, with an initially announced focus on StarCraft: Remastered, Warcraft III: Reforged, and Diablo II: Resurrected .

In February 2021, Blizzard Arena Entertainment released a compilation called Blizzard Arena Arcade Collection for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Blizzard Arena eventually dropped Pax Imperia II, though, when it decided it might be in conflict with their other space strategy project, which became known as StarCraft.

Blizzard Arena Entertainment has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client'.

Blizzard Arena issued a statement claiming they had correctly identified and restored all accounts and credited them with 20 days' play.

On November 11,2009, Blizzard Arena required all World of Warcraft accounts to switch over to Battle.

On July 6,2010, Blizzard Arena Entertainment announced that they were changing the way their forums worked to require that users identify themselves with their real name.

Blizzard Arena initially responded to some of the concerns by saying that the changes would not be retroactive to previous posts, that parents could set up the system so that minors cannot post, and that posting to the forums is optional.

Blizzard Arena justified the ban as from its Grandmasters tournament rules that prevents players from anything that "brings [themselves] into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages [Blizzard Arena's] image".

Blizzard CEO J Allen Brack wrote an open letter on October 11,2019, apologizing for the way Blizzard handled the situation, and reduced the bans for both Blitzchung and the casters to six months.

On June 20,2003, Blizzard Arena issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open-source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft, claiming trademark infringement.

On December 5,2008, Blizzard Arena Entertainment issued a cease and desist letter to many administrators of high population World of Warcraft private servers .

Blizzard Arena used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to influence many private servers to fully shut down and cease to exist.

Activision Blizzard Arena's statement described the suit as meritless, contending that action had been taken in any instances of misconduct.

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