Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February 1991 in California as Silicon & Synapse by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce, and took the Blizzard name in 1994. It is headquartered in Irvine, California. It has been owned by Activision Blizzard since 2008, and since October 2023 by Microsoft, where it works as a separate business inside the Xbox division.

It builds and runs online games: the Warcraft series including World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Overwatch and the card game Hearthstone, delivered through its Battle.net service. Studios include Blizzard Albany, formerly Vicarious Visions, and a Boston team that came with Proletariat in 2022.

Blizzard does not publish a current headcount. Wikipedia gives 13,000 for 2022, a figure that reflects the whole Activision Blizzard group's staffing at the time, and a workforce-data estimate from Revelio Labs puts Blizzard at about 5,000 in 2025. Its careers page lists nine offices across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.