Blizzard
Blizzard spent two decades as the most trusted studio in the industry and then stopped being that. This facet is BlizzCon at its height, the designers who argued with players in public, the 2021 walkout after California regulators sued the company over its treatment of women, the $68.7bn sale to Microsoft, the layoffs that followed it, and the collapse and repair of the Chinese partnership that took the game away from three million people for 556 days.
Part of World of Warcraft
45 moments in this segment.
- - Metzen at BlizzCon 2005. Chris Metzen on stage at the first BlizzCon. For twenty years he was the public face of Warcraft's story and, for much of the audience, of Blizzard itself.
- - Paul Sams at E3, 2006. Blizzard's chief operating officer at E3 in 2006, the year the game passed six million subscribers and became the largest subscription MMO ever run.
- - Bruce Hack. The Vivendi Games executive who oversaw Blizzard during WoW's rise, photographed in 2006. The corporate ownership above Blizzard changed repeatedly across the game's life; the game did not.
- - Rob Pardo and Tom Chilton. Two of the designers most responsible for the game's shape: Pardo as lead designer, Chilton as game director for over a decade. Chilton ran WoW through Wrath, Cataclysm and Mists.
- - Wrath of the Lich King revealed. The BlizzCon 2007 reveal of the expansion that would take the game to its twelve-million-subscriber peak.
- - Cataclysm revealed. BlizzCon 2009: Blizzard announces it will destroy and rebuild the world players had spent five years in.
- - The Cataclysm nerdscream, filmed from the floor. An attendee's recording of Chris Metzen opening BlizzCon 2009 and announcing Cataclysm, the expansion that would delete the old Azeroth. The archive holds the announcement; this is the room reacting to it, shot from inside the crowd. Filmed 21 August 2009, uploaded three days later.
- - Geek Is. Metzen's opening speech at BlizzCon 2010, delivered to a hall of people who had paid to be in a room about a video game.
- - Ghostcrawler. Greg Street, the lead systems designer who spent years arguing with players in public under the name Ghostcrawler, an unusually exposed position for a developer to hold.
- - Playing the demo at BlizzCon 2011. Attendees at machines running the unreleased expansion. The convention was built around letting several thousand people play something a few weeks early.
- - Pandaria, unveiled at BlizzCon 2011. The preview trailer that introduced Mists of Pandaria at BlizzCon 2011, a year before the expansion shipped on 25 September 2012. It is the announcement itself rather than the story cinematic, and it drew immediate scepticism that Blizzard had turned an April Fools race into an expansion.
- - Ghostcrawler on patch 5.4. A design interview from the end of Mists of Pandaria, when Street was still the most visible developer on the game.
- - BlizzCon 2013 opening. The opening ceremony at which the "you think you do, but you don't" exchange took place later the same weekend.
- - A developer panel. A design talk at BlizzCon 2013. The panels are the only venue where the people making the decisions answer directly to the people affected by them, in a room, on the record.
- - Questions from the floor. The audience half of a BlizzCon panel. The format has produced several of the most-quoted moments in the game's history, usually not the ones Blizzard planned.
- - Jarod Nandin at BlizzCon 2013. Floor footage of Jarod Nandin at BlizzCon 2013, the costumed regular known for the 'how do you kill that which has no life' line, filmed by another attendee. He died in 2021, and the uploader added the note afterwards. BlizzCon's crowd is one of the few parts of this story that was ever photographable, and this is one attendee filming another.
- - The demo floor, BlizzCon 2013. BlizzCon 2013, the convention at which Blizzard was asked about legacy servers and answered that players thought they wanted them but did not.
- - BlizzCon 2014. The opening ceremony for the tenth-anniversary year.
- - Battle for Azeroth announced on stage. The BlizzCon 2017 opening-ceremony segment in which Battle for Azeroth is revealed to the hall. The announcement is the event here, the reveal, the reaction of the room, and the ritual of the opening ceremony as Blizzard had refined it over a decade. Captured from the broadcast by an attendee-facing channel.
- - The demo at BlizzCon 2017. Attendees playing Battle for Azeroth months before release, at the convention where it was announced.
- - Greg Street: twenty years of making games. An hour-long conference talk by Greg Street, the designer who spent years as WoW's public face under the handle Ghostcrawler, given after he left Blizzard for Riot. He talks through what two decades of shipping games taught him, including the years he spent explaining class balance to an audience that argued back.
- - Metzen returns to the stage. A Q&A appearance after Metzen had stepped back from Blizzard, citing anxiety and burnout, a rare public account from someone at that level of the industry.
- - The axe at Hangzhou. A Warcraft axe outside NetEase's campus in Hangzhou, the Chinese partner that ran the game from 2009. When the partnership collapsed in early 2023, NetEase dismantled the sculpture outside these offices as the servers went dark.
- - BlizzCon 2018, opening ceremony. The full opening ceremony of BlizzCon 2018, two and a half hours on stage in Anaheim. This is the convention at its peak scale, and the same show whose Diablo Immortal announcement made the audience reaction a news story in itself. Recorded 2 November 2018; the upload date is days later.
- - BlizzCon 2019. The opening ceremony that announced both Shadowlands and, to considerably more noise, WoW Classic's successor plans.
- - The original team plays Classic. Developers who built the 2004 game returning to it in 2019, through the version Blizzard had spent years insisting nobody really wanted.
- - International coverage of the walkout. The walkout reported as a labour story rather than a games story. The lawsuit that triggered it was filed in July 2021 by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
- - The open letter. Employees published an open letter rejecting the company's initial response to the lawsuit, which had called the allegations distorted.
- - BlizzConline. The pandemic edition, held online, with no hall and no queue.
- - The walkout. After California regulators sued the company over its treatment of women, employees of Activision Blizzard walked out. It is one of the few organised labour actions the American games industry has produced.
- - An analyst reads the Activision deal, day one. Yahoo Finance interviews a Jefferies equity analyst on the day Microsoft announced its $68.7bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, framing it as a bet on gaming scale rather than on any game. Broadcast the morning the deal was public, twenty-one months before it closed against an FTC challenge in October 2023.
- - Inside the Microsoft deal. Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January 2022 at $68.7 billion. It became the largest deal in the history of the games industry.
- - Blizzard and NetEase fail to agree. After fourteen years, Blizzard and its Chinese partner could not agree renewal terms. The announcement gave Chinese players roughly two months' notice that their servers would close.
- - The FTC sues to block it. American regulators moved to stop the acquisition. The case ran for more than two years before it was finally dropped in May 2025.
- - The last minutes in China. Chinese servers went dark at midnight at the end of 23 January 2023, after sixteen years. Around three million active players lost access to their characters.
- - The statue comes down. NetEase dismantled the orc statue outside its Hangzhou campus as the partnership ended, a corporate divorce conducted with unusual visibility.
- - A player sues. A Chinese player sued Blizzard over the shutdown. NetEase opened a refund channel that took over a million applications in about a day.
- - Microsoft closes. The acquisition completed on 13 October 2023, after regulatory fights in three jurisdictions.
- - BlizzCon 2023, the Warcraft segment. The World of Warcraft portion of the BlizzCon 2023 opening ceremony, staged on 3 November 2023 at the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. Blizzard announced three expansions at once as the World Soul Saga, plus Cataclysm Classic and Season of Discovery, three weeks after Microsoft closed its acquisition.
- - The layoffs. Three months after the acquisition closed, Microsoft cut 1,900 roles across its gaming division. Blizzard's president and one of its co-founders left the same day, and a survival game six years in development was cancelled.
- - The return is announced. Blizzard and NetEase announced a new agreement in April 2024. Over two million Chinese players pre-registered within days.
- - Counting the losses. Coverage of the scale of cuts across Activision Blizzard through 2024, in an industry year that set records for layoffs.
- - The player count, finally. Blizzard stopped publishing subscriber numbers in 2015 at 5.5 million. Occasional disclosures since are the only public data anyone has.
- - Ghostcrawler on what MMOs are for. Greg Street, long after leaving Blizzard, on player agency and where the genre went, from someone who spent years making the decisions being argued about.
- - State of Azeroth 2026. Blizzard's annual address on the game's direction. The 2026 edition drew a peak of 355,888 concurrent viewers, more than that year's world-first race.
