The once prosperous Blizzard Entertainment is declining in popularity due to consumer exploitation and corporate misconduct towards women, leading to its decline in recent years.
Starting in the early ‘90s, Blizzard paved its way into the home console market before settling into computer gaming development with the release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994). It wasn’t until 2004 when they struck gold with the release of World of Warcraft, their massively multiplayer online role-playing video game, otherwise known as an MMORPG. “At its peak in the mid-to-late 2000s, World of Warcraft was a cultural phenomenon in a way few games have ever been or ever will be. It revolutionized the niche genre of MMORPGs (or MMOs, for short) and made the then-burgeoning world of always-online, large-scale community gaming appealing to the masses,” said Rolling Stone.
Additionally, Blizzard found success in delving outside of its comfort zone, trudging into the ‘hero shooter’ genre, which seemed fairly new at the time. Hence, May of 2016 brought their release of Overwatch, receiving massive kudos at launch. To say this game was popular is a huge understatement: Overwatch was practically everywhere. According to GQ, gamers found appeal in the game through its unique marketing as it was sold less like a video game and more like a Pixar film, with a roster of heroes from around the world and an overwhelmingly optimistic tone. The game brought fresh gameplay to an otherwise niche genre and “was the father of the hero shooter. There was nothing else before it besides Battleborn, but Overwatch really popularized the hero shooter genre,” said Anthony Rivera, English teacher. As a result of Blizzard popularizing hero shooter games, more would come to light, such as Apex Legends (2019), Valorant (2020), and Marvel Rivals (2024), to name a few.
With all their success and innovation for the gaming community, how did it fall apart? Plenty of people have their own speculations as to when Blizzard exactly began to decline, but the majority agree one of the primary reasons is their heavy monetization. One of the many games victim to this is Hearthstone (2014), an online collectible card game. Pre-monetization era, the game had “an arena gamemode called battlegrounds. You could pick four different heroes and earn gold for playing and then use that gold to buy packs to upgrade heroes,” said Alan Bird, English teacher, who played numerous Blizzard games. With their more recent changes, “you can still earn gold in this mode, but you can’t buy anything because they replaced the money system, so playing the game doesn’t get you anything extra anymore. The four original heroes you could pick are now limited to two, with the other two slots locked behind a paywall,” Bird added. Expressing the same frustration Bird felt, gamers agree that more of Blizzard’s library has faced similar changes since then.
Furthermore, Blizzard faced a lawsuit in 2021 by the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) for engaging in unlawful employment practices against women based on sex, according to California’s CRD. The publicity of this lawsuit left a sour taste for many gamers, some of which actively boycott the company as a result. “I stopped giving them money after the sexual harassment lawsuit. The lawsuit was horrific; they were discriminating against women in the worst ways, and instead of owning up to it, they denied everything, so I will not be giving them money in the near future,” commented Charlotte Bird, Choir teacher and former Blizzard fan.
All things considered, Blizzard Entertainment once dominated and actively influenced the gaming market but fell short in increased money-making strategies and treatment of workers. Their most successful projects acted as the framework for greater projects to come, so it’s a shame to see the company crumble from their humble beginnings.
