Extra Credit Blog 2

Blizzard Inc. is the largest U.S. video-game maker. The company has created many epic games, such as Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone. Each game has its own glorious history. Blizzard believes the sales will keep rising in the next few years. The operation management of Blizzard Inc. is very impressive. They spent about 500 million dollars to investigate new games and improve existing games every year. Although total operating cost is expensive, they can earn 4.5 billion dollars in sales each year. The scale of Blizzard Inc. is much larger than other U.S. video-game makers. They don’t produce many games, but every game they made is very famous. This indicates that Blizzard Inc. focus more on quality instead of quantity.

The strategies of making games in Blizzard are wonderful. About 15 years ago, Warcraft 3 was coming. They gave every minion and hero a unique history or position in this game. Blizzard created millions of year history for this game, when players playing the game, they would feel that they are discovering history of this world. In this way, players would feel discovering history is more meaningful than playing game. Since Warcraft 3 achieve a huge success, they made another game named World of Warcraft. It utilized same history as Warcraft, but in this game, players control a little person to beat minions and heroes from Warcraft 3. And this game gives players a chance to change history, and player could build large and strong teams which other players. As usual, Blizzard always bring something outside the games to players.

Hearthstone is also a game with the same history as the last two I mentioned. However, this game is more likely a small game. You need to brainstorm and appropriately use your cards beat other players. You can not only regard this as a competing game, but also a small game for entertaining. It will be accepted by more people. The strategies of making games made the company become more powerful and successful. Now, they own a lot of loyal fans, and get a huge achievement that other video-game companies cannot compete with. Players could receive some feelings beyond these games. This is the charm of games that Blizzard made.

Reference:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-08-05/activision-tops-analysts-estimates-as-online-sales-rise