Blizzard Entertainment
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| Blizzard Entertainment logo | |
| Company type | Private (subsidiary of Vivendi Games) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer and video game industry |
| Founded | 1991 |
| Founder | Michael Morhaime  |
| Headquarters |  Irvine, CA, U.S. Vélizy, Yvelines, France |
Key people | Michael Morhaime (president and co-founder) Frank Pearce (vice president and co-founder) Rob Pardo (vice president) Shahram Dabiri (producer on World of Warcraft) Jeffrey Kaplan (lead designer on World of Warcraft) |
| Products | The Warcraft series The StarCraft series The Diablo series |
| Revenue |  $1.5 Billion |
Number of employees | 2,700[1] |
| Website | www.blizzard.com |
Blizzard Entertainment is an American computer game developer and publisher headquartered in Irvine, California.
History
Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock N' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.
Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by Sierra On-line which was then acquired by a company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On-line which included Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi.
In 1996, Blizzard acquired Condor Games, which had been working on the game Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, and has since developed hit games Diablo, Diablo II, and its expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Blizzard North was located in San Mateo, California.
Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January of 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles from Interplay Entertainment and re-release them under Game Boy Advance.[2] In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Vélizy, Yvelines, France, responsible for the European in-game support of World of Warcraft. On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, its MMORPG offering. On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing StarCraft: Ghost. The team was renamed Blizzard Console and is now focusing on next generation consoles, after StarCraft: Ghost was 'postponed indefinitely'. On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.
Titles
- StarCraft II has been officially announced as of May 19, 2007, at the World Wide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea.
- World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has been officially announced as of August 3, 2007, at Blizzcon 2007 in Anaheim, California, United States.
- Warcraft film (2008) - Movie based on the popular Warcraft series.
Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations, and StarCraft: Ghost, which was indefinitely postponed on March 24, 2006 after being in development hell for much of its lifespan, and whose current status is in question. The company also has a history of missing release dates.[3]
Pax Imperia II was originally announced as a title to be published by Blizzard. Blizzard eventually dropped Pax Imperia II, though, when it decided it might be in conflict with their other space strategy project, the now-legendary StarCraft. THQ eventually contracted with Heliotrope and released the game in 1997 as Pax Imperia Eminent Domain.
Blizzard Entertainment has announced that they will be producing a Warcraft live-action movie. [4]
Former employees
Over the years, some former Blizzard employees have moved on and established gaming companies of their own:
- Flagship Studios[5], currently working on Hellgate: London and Mythos.
- ArenaNet[6], creators of the Guild Wars franchise.
- Ready at Dawn Studios[7], creators of Daxter, currently developing God of War: Chains of Olympus.
- Red 5 Studios[8], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen MMOG.
- Castaway Entertainment[9], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title.
- U.I. Pacific Games[10], currently working on a PC and Xbox 360 MMOG.
- Nethera Studios[11], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title.
Controversies
Battle.net
Battle.net is an online gaming service used for its games Diablo, Starcraft, Starcraft: Brood War, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, Warcraft III, and Warcraft III Expansion Set: The Frozen Throne. It was released in January 1997 coinciding with the release of Diablo. It functions as a way to play over the Internet, featuring cooperative and player-versus-player game playing, a game matchmaking system, and online chat among other features. Battle.net is free, and only requires an Internet connection and account registration in order to use.
A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games.
In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "Battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.
Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA.[citation needed] As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.[citation needed]
This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1, 2005.
Warden Client
Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client'. When running, the client scans an individual's computer in order to verify compliance with the EULA/TOS. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game, and all players consent, via the EULA and terms of use, to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running. [12]
The Warden client scans the process names, window titles, and a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any of these third-party programs are running. This determination is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes known to correspond to cheat programs. [13] The Warden scans all processes running on a computer, not just the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across what would be considered private information and other personally identifiable information. It is because of these peripherial scans that Warden has been accused of being spyware and has run afoul of controversy among privacy advocates. [14] [15] [16]
The Warden's reliability in correctly discerning legitimate vs illegitimate actions has been called into question due to actions Blizzard has taken regarding the information gathered by Warden. Most notably, that it appears that many players are reported as violating the EULA/TOS by the program, and subsequently banned, when in fact they are not. Among programs mis-identified as cheating programs are controller mapping programs, macro programs running idle in the system tray, and even some WoW add-ons. These types of wrongful account closures often take a long time to correct with the Blizzard admin department because of the reason for which the account was closed.
A large scale incident happened when many Linux users were banned after an update to Warden caused it to incorrectly detect Cedega as a cheat program. [17] Blizzard issued a statement claiming they had correctly identified and restored all accounts and credited them with 20 days play. [18] Interestingly, Blizzard has regularly stated that the Warden sends no information, only a violation flag, to the home server. However, without specific information it would have been impossible for Blizzard to discern Cedega users from actual violaters. [19]
The Warden is not the first time Blizzard Entertainment has attempted to look at their customer's computers. In 1998 Blizzard Entertainment had a class action lawsuit filed against them for "unlawful business practices" for the action of collecting data from a user's computer without their permission. [20]
FreeCraft
On June 20, 2003, Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used.[citation needed]
As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name of Stratagus.[citation needed]
Corporate Culture
Blizzard gives much discretion to its developers in deciding on future games, believing that developers who are gamers will best understand what gamers in the marketplace will want. [21]
April Fools'
Every year on the 1st of April, Blizzard posts creative humorous news on their website as an April Fools' joke.
Blizzard's 2007 jokes are currently available at the World of Warcraft site[22]. They include the "Tinfoil Hat," an absurdly long and difficult attunement process for their next dungeon, The Black Temple, and the announcement of a new RTS: "Warcraft: Heroes of Azeroth." The Tinfoil Hat is explained to be an equippable hat to prevent people from seeing items, statistics, or the character in general. The attunement process for The Black Temple is absurdly long, with a few incredibly difficult to achieve requirements at the end. For example, it requires that fifteen bosses from the hardest level of dungeons be killed within ten minutes of each other. The RTS is simply Warcraft III with some changes made to the advertisement text. Also, the four "boxes" available in the picture were obviously taken from Warcraft III with the game name edited on.
In 2006, one of their jokes was related to the then upcoming World of Warcraft's expansion: The Burning Crusade. Blizzard had not revealed what the new Alliance race would be, and on March 31st, one day early, they posted a news item on the World of Warcraft main page saying that the new race would be the Wisps. (In Warcraft III, Wisps are resource-gatherers for the Night Elves.) Wisps were given the 'Detonate' racial ability that caused them to permanently explode, requiring a new character to be rolled.[23] The Alliance race was later officially revealed on May 10 at E³ as the Draenei.
The other news posted at the same time was that Blizzard planned to open a fast food chain named BurgerCraft, where people could order food and drinks named after Blizzard characters and games.[24] This news was actually posted on the main page after a joke thread authored by the player Gilgamesh on the Alleria realm was made in their General Forums as a complaint lambasting Blizzards' customer service.[25]
Blizzard also posted an absurdly long list of updates to World of Warcraft that would have ruined most characters and gameplay.[26] These fake patch notes included many contradictory changes, one example being "using friendly emotes will now significantly increase the Infernal and Doomguard's chance to remain loyal to the Warlock," with the following entry reading, "Friendly emotes are no longer available to the Warlock."
A previous April Fools' joke included a new race, Pandaren, supposedly included in a patch for Warcraft III (the Pandaren Brewmaster later became a hireable Hero Class in the game's expansion, due to positive response to the joke). [27]
Blizzard also once stated that the two-headed ogre would be a playable race in the upcoming World of Warcraft MMORPG, and that it would require cooperation between two players to control the ogre as each player would only control one head.
See also
References
- ^ Brandon Sheffield (2007-07-13). "E3 Exclusive: Blizzard Establishes Third Team, New Game Expected". Gamasutra. Retrieved 2007-07-14.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Morhaime, Mike (2002-11-22). "Blizzard Insider" (url) (Interview). Interviewed by Blizzard Insider. Retrieved 2007-06-23.
{{cite interview}}: More than one of|subject=and|last=specified (help); Unknown parameter|program=ignored (help); Unknown parameter|subjectlink=ignored (|subject-link=suggested) (help) - ^ GamePro Staff (2006-08-29). "GamePro Q&A: Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan on The Burning Crusade". GamePro. Retrieved 2006-09-30.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ "Blizzard Entertainment - Press Release". 2006-05-09. Retrieved 2006-08-31.
- ^ About Flagship Studios
- ^ ArenaNet
- ^ About Ready At Dawn Studios
- ^ Red 5 Studios
- ^ About Castaway Entertainment
- ^ UIPG Company Information
- ^ Nethèra Studios
- ^ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html
- ^ http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358
- ^ http://play.tm/story/6837
- ^ http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/documents/definitions.htm
- ^ http://news.mmosite.com/content/2006-11-26/20061126193343858.shtml
- ^ http://www.linuxlookup.com/2006/nov/15/linux_users_banned_from_world_of_warcraft
- ^ http://www.linuxlookup.com/2006/nov/22/blizzard_unbans_linux_world_of_warcraft_players
- ^ http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=blizzard-archive&t=33&p=1&tmp=1#post33
- ^ http://attrition.org/errata/company/blizzard01.html
- ^ http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=6397
- ^ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com
- ^ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/townhall/wisps.html
- ^ http://www.blizzard.com/press/060401.shtml
- ^ "Welcome to World of Burgercraft". Archived from the original on 2005-03-23.
- ^ "1.11.0 Patch Notes". Retrieved 2007-02-11.
- ^ http://www.battle.net/war3/pandaren/