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120-422: Every season of Apex was contested by 16 teams from both Korea and invited non-Korean teams, aside from season four, which had no invited non-Korean teams. For the first season, 64 South Korean teams advanced from an online qualifier to an offline qualifiers, with the top 12 teams advancing to the main league, and the following 12 teams after that qualified for Overwatch Apex Challengers, a promotion tournament for

240-483: A Warcraft live-action film . The movie was directed by Duncan Jones , financed and produced by Legendary Pictures , Atlas Entertainment , and others, and distributed by Universal Pictures . It was released in June 2016. On October 4, 2022, Overwatch servers were officially shut off at the same time Overwatch 2 ' s went up. Blizzard has released two spin-offs to the main franchises: Hearthstone (2014), which

360-879: A "development league" in North America and Europe. Following, OGN announced that no international teams would be invited to compete in Apex for its fourth season; instead, OGN cancelled Apex's promotion and relegation event and invited the top five teams from the Challengers league. Season 4 was contested by MVP Space, Meta Athena, KongDoo Uncia, Flash Lux, Afreeca Freecs, ROX Orcas, Meta Bellum, LW Blue, Lunatic-Hai, RunAway, KongDoo Panthera, NC Foxes, LW Red, GC Busan, X6-Gaming and CONBOX. In late 2017, Blizzard Entertainment announced that Overwatch Contenders would operate in seven regions globally, and that Overwatch Apex would be re-branded as Contenders Korea. OGN had planned to run

480-476: A "ladder" that uses a promotion and relegation system, where individual players and pre-made teams can be promoted and relegated during the first few weeks of a league season, which generally lasts around 11 weeks, with promotion and relegation taking place based on a skill rating, which is in turn based on wins and losses. However, this form of matchmaking is not typically used for StarCraft II e-sports tournaments, which have various kinds of structures depending on

600-575: A Blizzard employee before leaving to found the studio. The game, StarCraft: Ghost , was a stealth-oriented game compared to the RTS features of StarCraft , and was a major feature of the 2002 Tokyo Game Show . However, over the next few years, the game entered development hell with conflicts between Nihilisitic and Blizzard on its direction. Blizzard ordered Nihilistic to stop work on StarCraft: Ghost in July 2004, and instead brought on Swingin' Ape Studios,

720-659: A business park near the University of California, Irvine in Irvine, California . During the first two years, the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Interplay Productions ' Brian Fargo was friends with Adham and had a 10% stake in Silicon & Synapse. Fargo provided the company with conversion contacts for the games Interplay was publishing, starting with Battle Chess . Other titles included Ports include titles such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of

840-499: A company that published educational software and which had previously employed Silicon & Synapse for conversion contracts, made an offer to buy the company for $ 4 million. Interplay was negotiating to be the publisher for Warcraft , and Fargo cautioned Adham and Morhaime against selling the company. Adham and Morhiame rejected Davidson & Associates' initial offer, but the company came back with another offer of $ 6.75 million (equivalent to $ 13.9 million in 2023), assuring to

960-734: A company-wide layoff of 8% of Activision Blizzard staff, around 800 total positions, due to lower revenues in 2018; this included a significant portion of Blizzard Entertainment, which had been since as having bloated head count over the years. Blizzard was planning for the announcement of Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 at the 2019 Blizzcon, and to keep the company focused, two other projects, codenamed Ares and Orion , were cancelled. Frank Pearce announced he would be stepping down as Blizzard's Chief Development Officer on July 19, 2019, though will remain in an advisory role similar to Morhaime. Michael Chu, lead writer on many of Blizzard's franchises including Diablo , Warcraft , and Overwatch , announced he

1080-561: A compilation called Blizzard Arcade Collection for Microsoft Windows , Xbox One , PlayStation 4 , and Nintendo Switch . The collection includes five Blizzard's classic video games: The Lost Vikings , Rock n' Roll Racing , Blackthorne , The Lost Vikings 2 and RPM Racing , with the last two games added in April 2021. Some of the modern features include 16:9 resolution, 4-player split-screen, rewinding and saving of game progress, watching replays, and adding graphic filters to change

1200-730: A decade (concluded 1891). In 1903 it accepted parity with the American League and the formation of the organization that would become Major League Baseball . The peace agreement between the NL and the AL did not change the "closed shop" of top-level baseball but entrenched it by including the AL in the shop. This was further confirmed by the Supreme Court's 1922 ruling in Federal Baseball Club v. National League , giving MLB

1320-722: A dedicated esports venue, the Blizzard Arena, to be used for the Overwatch League and other events. The inaugural season of the Overwatch League launched on January 10, 2018, with 12 global teams playing. By the second season in 2019 it had expanded the League to 20 teams, and with its third season in 2020, it will have these teams traveling across the globe in a transitional home/away-style format. In 2012, Blizzard Entertainment had 4,700 employees, with offices across 11 cities including Austin, Texas , and countries around

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1440-636: A fifth season of Apex before it was rebranded to Contenders; however, in December 2017, Korean news outlet Sports Chosun reported that Blizzard had sold the Contenders Korea broadcasting rights to television channel MBC . In January 2018, OGN announced that they would be ending the Apex tournament series and would not be a part of Contenders Korea, confirming that Blizzard had sold the broadcasting rights in an interview, stating, "We did our best and agreed to most of Blizzard's conditions on continuing

1560-816: A fresh idea within a few weeks or have their team reassigned to Blizzard's other departments. The small team came upon the idea of a team-based multiplayer shooter game, reusing many of the assets from Titan but set in a new near-future narrative. The new project was greenlit by Blizzard and became known as Overwatch , which was released in May 2016. Overwatch became the fourth main intellectual property of Blizzard, following Warcraft , StarCraft , and Diablo . In addition to Hearthstone and Overwatch , Blizzard Entertainment continued to produce sequels and expansions to its established properties during this period, including StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) and Diablo III (2012). Their major crossover title, Heroes of

1680-623: A head when, in April 2009, Blizzard announced it was terminating its contract with The9, and transferred operation of World of Warcraft in China to NetEase. They released an improved version of Battle.net (Battle.net 2.0) in March 2009 which included improved matchmaking, storefront features, and better support for all of Blizzard's existing titles particularly World of Warcraft . Having peaked at 12 million monthly subscriptions in 2010, World of Warcraft subscriptions sunk to 6.8 million in 2014,

1800-440: 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,

1920-627: A legal monopoly over professional baseball in the US. The other major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada have followed the MLB model of a franchise based system. In contrast to baseball's NABBP , the first governing body in English football survived the onset of professionalism, which it formally accepted in 1885. Perhaps the great geographical concentration of population and

2040-499: A live television program. The addition of a semi-final in 2004 allowed for more than 26 songs, but in 2008 automatic qualification of the previous year's top 10 to the final was removed. In Brazilian carnival's samba school contest, a similar system is adopted, with the schools from lower divisions, or "groups", able to be promoted into the highest tier, being currently called the "Special Group" ( Grupo Especial ). Schools parade in order of groups and ranking from last year contest, with

2160-694: A lower level, like independent professional leagues in American baseball today). For decades, teams finishing near the bottom of The Football League's lowest division(s) faced re-election rather than automatic relegation. But the principle of promotion and relegation had been firmly established, and it eventually expanded to the football pyramid in place today. Meanwhile, The FA has remained English football's overall governing body, retaining amateur and professional clubs rather than breaking up. Promotion and relegation has been used in several eSports leagues. Blizzard Entertainment 's video game StarCraft II has

2280-501: A number of seasons. Originally the previous two seasons, and later three or four seasons, clubs avoid relegation by having a high coefficient, which is obtained by dividing the points achieved in the last three seasons by the number of matches played in the same period. Teams with the lowest points coefficient at the end of the season are relegated to the Primera B Nacional . This system has both positive and negative aspects, since all of

2400-574: A place in the league year after year would permit the owners to monopolize fan bases in their exclusive territories and give them the confidence to invest in infrastructure, such as improved ballparks. In turn, those would guarantee the revenues to support traveling halfway across a continent for games. Indeed, after its first season, the new league banked on its still doubtful stability by expelling its members in New York and Philadelphia (the two largest cities), because they had breached agreements to visit

2520-487: A result of some information leaks. Blizzard continued to speak on Titan ' s development over the next few years, with over 100 people within Blizzard working on the project. However, Titan ' s development was troubled, and, internally, in May 2013, Blizzard cancelled the project (publicly reporting this in 2014), and reassigned most of the staff but left about 40 people, led by Jeff Kaplan , to either come up with

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2640-501: A science-fiction themed RTS StarCraft and released the title in March 1998. The title was the top-selling PC game for the year, and led to further growth of the Battle.net service and the use of the game for esports . Around 2000, Blizzard engaged with Nihilistic Software to work on a version of StarCraft for home consoles for Blizzard. Nihilisitic was co-founded by Robert Huebner, who had worked on StarCraft and other games while

2760-529: A similar system where in the top eight finishers of one of the bi-annual Majors are designated with the "Legends" seed and automatically qualified for the next Major tournament. The best six eliminated teams in the second stage (known as New Legends Stage ) of the Major would play a "qualifying" stage (known as New Challengers Stage ) with another ten teams from the Minors qualifying tournaments in order to compete at

2880-448: A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard . Originally founded in 1991, the company is best known for producing the highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (2004), as well as the multi-million selling video game franchises Diablo , StarCraft and Overwatch . The company also operates Battle.net , an online gaming service. Founded as Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of

3000-418: A system of promotion and relegation, the best-ranked team(s) in a lower division are promoted to a higher division for the next season, and the worst-ranked team(s) in the higher division are relegated to the lower division for the next season. During the season, teams that are high enough in the league table that they would qualify for promotion are sometimes said to be in the promotion zone , and those at

3120-523: A third-party studio that had just successfully released Metal Arms: Glitch in the System in 2003, to reboot the development of Ghost . Blizzard fully acquired Swingin' Ape Studios in May 2005 to continue on Ghost . However, while the game was scheduled to be released in 2005, it was targeted at the consoles of the sixth generation , such as the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox , while the industry

3240-545: Is a fact that the relegated schools have more to lose nowadays, such as access to the Cidade do Samba ("Samba City") facilities. There have been reported several interferences on the contest's final result, especially when traditional schools are involved. From 1957 to 1966 and from 1983 to the present, the Argentine First Division has used a system called Promedios based on the average performance over

3360-545: Is set in the existing Warcraft lore, and Heroes of the Storm (2015), which features playable characters from all four of Blizzard's franchises. In 2015, Blizzard Entertainment formed "Classic Games division", a team focused on updating and remastering some of their older titles, with an initially announced focus on StarCraft: Remastered (2017), Warcraft III: Reforged (2020) , and Diablo II: Resurrected (2021) . In February 2021, Blizzard Entertainment released

3480-470: The 1999 Conmebol Cup . The Uruguayan First Division adopted the same system in 2016. Paraguayan Primera División and Colombian Categoría Primera A also use this same system. Also, a similar system was used only in the 1999 edition of Campeonato Brasileiro Série A . Notes Bibliography Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California , and

3600-431: The 2011 Copa Sudamericana . This system forces the newly promoted teams to fight relegation from the very beginning of the season. It also allows teams with a low budget with previous good campaigns to compete in international competitions without having to prioritize the championship to avoid relegation; examples of this are Club Atlético Lanús , winner of the 2013 Copa Sudamericana , or Club Atlético Talleres , winner of

3720-582: The Communications Workers of America . The same day, 60 QA testers at Blizzard's Austin office, who work on various games including Diablo IV and Hearthstone , also voted to unionize and formed the union "Texas Blizzard QA United-CWA". Blizzard Entertainment has developed 19 games since the inception of the company in 1991. The majority of the games Blizzard published are in the Warcraft , Diablo , and StarCraft series. Since

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3840-577: The English Football League ) was founded in 1888, it was not intended to be a rival of The Football Association but rather the top competition within it. The new league was not universally accepted as England's top-calibre competition right away. To help win fans of clubs outside The Football League, its circuit was not closed; rather, a system was established in which the worst teams at the end of each season would need to win re-election against any clubs wishing to join. A rival league,

3960-842: The Football Alliance , was formed in 1889. When the two merged in 1892, it was not on equal terms; rather, most of the Alliance clubs were put in the new Football League Second Division , whose best teams would move up to the First Division in place of its worst teams. Another merger, with the top division of the Southern League in 1920, helped form the Third Division in similar fashion. Since then no new league has been formed of non-league clubs to try to achieve parity with The Football League (only to play at

4080-602: The Game Boy Advance handheld console. Around 2003, Blizzard North was working on Diablo III as well as planned science-fiction-based version dubbed Starblo . Amid rumors that Vivendi was looking to sell its gaming division around 2003, Blizzard North's leadership, consisting of Brevik, the Schaefers, and Bill Roper , asked Blizzard to provide their studio protections from the potential sale, or else they would resign. After several rounds of tense communications,

4200-532: The Italian Football Federation has relegated clubs found to have been involved in match fixing . This occurred most recently in 2006, when the season's initial champions Juventus were relegated to Serie B, and two other teams were initially relegated but then restored to Serie A after appeal (see 2006 Serie A scandal ). As of the 2020s, empirical evidence increasingly pointed to the conclusion that promotion and relegation, standing alone,

4320-612: The New Legends Stage . Starting in 2020, however, this was changed to a Regional Major Ranking system, at first a points-based system which was used for ESL One Rio 2020 and PGL Stockholm 2021 (The top rankings from the ESL One Rio 2020 RMRs were turned into PGL Stockholm 2021 points once IEM Rio was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic ) and then a series of offline qualifiers starting with PGL Antwerp 2022 , in which

4440-453: The University of California, Los Angeles , the year prior. The name "Silicon & Synapse" was a high concept from the three founders, with "silicon" representing the building block of a computer, while "synapse" the building block of the brain. The initial logo was created by Stu Rose. To fund the company, each of them contributed about $ 10,000, Morhaime borrowing the sum interest-free from his grandmother. Their offices were established in

4560-500: The University of California, Los Angeles : Michael Morhaime , Frank Pearce and Allen Adham, the company began development of their own software in 1993, with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings , and changed its name to Chaos Studios, Inc. the same year, then to Blizzard Entertainment after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates in 1994; that year, the company released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans , which would receive numerous sequels and led to

4680-539: The Warcraft narrative universe, which ultimately became Hearthstone , released as a free-to-play title in March 2014. Hearthstone reached over 25 million players by the end of 2014, and exceeded 100 million players by 2018. Another small internal team began work around 2008 on a new intellectual property known as Titan , a more contemporary or near-future MMORPG that would have co-existed alongside World of Warcraft . The project gained more visibility in 2010 as

4800-464: The major league and minor leagues . The number of teams exchanged between the divisions is almost always identical. Exceptions occur when the higher division wishes to change the size of its membership, or has lost one or more of clubs (to financial insolvency or expulsion, for example) and wishes to restore its previous membership size, in which case fewer teams are relegated from that division, or (less often) more teams are accepted for promotion from

4920-498: The 2010s and 2020s, Blizzard has continued development of expansion packs for World of Warcraft (the most recent being 2024's The War Within ), while also releasing StarCraft: Remastered (2017), Diablo III (2012) and Diablo IV (2023), as well as new material most notably the online multiplayer games Hearthstone , a collectible card game ; Heroes of the Storm , a battle arena game; and Overwatch and Overwatch 2 , which are first-person shooters. Since 2018,

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5040-477: The Billie Jean King Cup) at the top and series of regional groups at a lower level. The World Groups in both use a knockout tournament format, with the first-round losers entering play-offs with winners from regional groups to avoid relegation. In international tournaments, this format allows teams from countries in which a sport is less well established to have competitive matches, while opening up

5160-559: The CEO of Activision , had been working to rebound the company from near-bankruptcy, and had established a number of new studios. However, Activision lacked anything in the MMO market. Kotick saw that World of Warcraft was bringing in over US$ 1.1 billion a year in subscription fees, and began approaching Vivendi's CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy about potential acquisition of their struggling Vivendi Games division, which included Blizzard Entertainment. Lévy

5280-484: The Clans , an adventure game which was canceled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations , a turn-based strategy game cancelled around 1996, and StarCraft: Ghost , an action game aimed for release on consoles, co-developed with Nihilistic Software , which was "Postponed indefinitely" on March 24, 2006, after being in development hell for much of its lifespan. Work on a project called Nomad started around 1998 after

5400-705: The LCK moved away from the system in 2020. As of 2023, the Pacific Championship Series and Liga Latinoamérica are the only top-tier professional League of Legends leagues to have promotion and relegation; North America's second-tier league, the North American Challengers League, also has promotion and relegation, as do the various regional leagues in Europe, but not with the top divisions. The Counter-Strike Majors used

5520-517: The Paris suburb of Vélizy , Yvelines, France. Blizzard began work on World of Warcraft near the end of 1999, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on the Warcraft franchise, with gameplay inspired by EverQuest . The game was publicly announced in September 2001. The excitement by the media for World of Warcraft led to significant growth with Team 2 from forty to

5640-544: The Rings , the company began work on what would become Warcraft: Orcs & Humans . Adham saw this as a start of a series of interconnected titles, similar to the Gold Box series by Strategic Simulations . To support its development and keep the company afloat, the studio took several more conversion contracts, though the founders were going into debt to keep their twelve developers employed. Davidson & Associates ,

5760-511: The Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess . Fargo then enlisted Silicon & Synapse around 1991 to help develop RPM Racing that Interplay was preparing for the launch of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System . Fargo remained impressed with Silicon & Synapse's work, and provided them the ability to write their own games to be published by Interplay. The first two titles developed solely by

5880-480: The Storm , was released as a MOBA game in 2015. The game featured various characters from Blizzard's franchises as playable heroes, as well as different battlegrounds based on Warcraft , Diablo , StarCraft , and Overwatch universes. In the late 2010s, Blizzard released StarCraft: Remastered (2017) and Warcraft III: Reforged (2020) , remastered versions of the original StarCraft and Warcraft III, respectively . The May 2016 release of Overwatch

6000-532: The Torneo Apertura in 2009 and last place in the next championship, the Torneo Clausura 2010, without being relegated until the end of the Torneo Apertura 2010 with a second-to-last place finish. Similarly, River Plate finished last in the Torneo Apertura 2008 and after two bad campaigns and a mediocre one was relegated in the Torneo Clausura 2011 despite being in fifth place and qualifying for

6120-741: The UC Irvine campus to a newly constructed 240,000-square foot campus in Irvine, California, to support the additional staff, which was completed by March 2008; the city named the primary street on this campus as 1 Blizzard Way to honor the company. The campus includes a twelve-foot tall bronze status of a Warcraft orc riding a wolf, with plaques surrounding it representing the eight company values by that point, "Gameplay First", "Commit to Quality", "Play Nice; Play Fair", "Embrace Your Inner Geek", "Learn & Grow", "Every Voice Matters", "Think Globally", and "Lead Responsibly". Up through 2006, Bobby Kotick ,

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6240-532: The United States, and by March 2005, had reached 1.5 million subscribers worldwide. Blizzard partnered with Chinese publisher The9 to publish and distribute World of Warcraft in China, as foreign companies could not directly publish into the country themselves. World of Warcraft launched in China in June 2005. By the end of 2007, World of Warcraft was considered a global phenomenon, having reached over 9 million subscribers and exceeded US$ 1 billion in revenue since its release. In April 2008, World of Warcraft

6360-540: The amount of invited non-Korean teams from four to two. Returning South Korean teams from Season 2 included Lunatic-Hai, KongDoo Panthera, Afreeca Freecs Blue, RunAway, KongDoo Uncia, Luxury Watch Blue, BK Stars, and Meta Athena, while qualified teams from Challengers included Mighty AOD, X6-Gaming, CONBOX Spirit, MVP Space, Flash Lux, and Rhinos Gaming Wings. The two invited Western teams were Rogue and Team EnVyUs. Season 3 began April 28, 2017. In May 2017, Blizzard Entertainment announced plans to launch Overwatch Contenders ,

6480-433: The award. Following the merger, Blizzard found it was relying on its well-established properties, but at the same time, the industry was experiencing a shift towards indie games . Blizzard established a few small teams within the company to work on developing new concepts based on the indie development approach that it could potentially use. One of these teams quickly came onto the idea of a collectible card game based on

6600-441: The better ranked inside a group and the higher-tier groups having the privilege of going latter (this means the team has the opportunity of fixing issues with costumes and allegorical floats as well as more rehearsal time). The number of promoted and relegated schools, four until 1997, has been diminishing as time passes, becoming two from 1998 to 2007 and being only one nowadays. There has never been an official reason for that, but it

6720-491: The bottom are in the relegation zone ( colloquially the drop zone or facing the drop ). An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises . This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams , and with no team movement between

6840-429: The boundary between the feeder leagues may have to transfer from one feeder league to another to maintain numerical balance. The system is said to be the defining characteristic of the "European" form of professional sports league organization . Promotion and relegation have the effect of allowing the maintenance of a hierarchy of leagues and divisions, according to the relative strength of their teams. They also maintain

6960-618: The cancellation of an unannounced MMO codenamed Titan on September 23, 2014, though Overwatch was created from its assets. The company also has a history of declining to set release dates, choosing to instead take as much time as needed, generally saying a given product is "done when it's done." 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, which became known as StarCraft . THQ eventually contracted with Heliotrope and released

7080-464: The casting duo Christopher "MonteCristo" Mykles and Erik "DoA" Lonnquist . The league's inaugural season began on October 7, 2016, with the group stage of the tournament. Following the group stage, an eight-team, single elimination tournament took place. The finals, which took place in Ilsan , South Korea on December 3, 2016, saw Team EnVyUs defeat Afreeca Freecs Blue, 4–1. Several changes were made for

7200-444: The club can not move underperforming players on, or second, the club is gambling on being promoted back straight away and is prepared to take a financial loss for one or two seasons to do so. Some leagues (most notably English football's Premier League ) offer " parachute payments " to its relegated teams for the following year(s). The payouts are higher than the prize money received by some non-relegated teams and are designed to soften

7320-419: The company president and CEO On October 3, 2018, while remaining an advisor to the company. Morhaime stated publicly that he felt it was time for someone else to lead Blizzard, but those close to him said he had become tired of the conflicts with Kotick. Morhaime formally left on April 7, 2019, and was replaced by J. Allen Brack, the executive producer on World of Warcraft . In February 2019, Kotick announced

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7440-409: The company were Rock n' Roll Racing , a sequel to RPM Racing , and The Lost Vikings inspired by Lemmings . Around 1993, co-founder Adham told the other executives that he did not like the name "Silicon & Synapse" anymore, as people outside the company were confusing the meaning of silicon the chemical element used in microchips with silicone the materials used in breast implants . By

7560-420: The company will continue to operate as a separate business, while part of the larger Microsoft Gaming division; Blizzard Entertainment retains its function as the publisher of games developed by their studios. Since 2005, Blizzard Entertainment has hosted annual gaming conventions for fans to meet and to promote their games, called BlizzCon , as well as a number of global events outside the United States. In

7680-463: The company's reputation has suffered from a series of poorly received games, controversies involving players and staff, and allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct against leading Blizzard employees. Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime , Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, after all three had earned their bachelor's degrees from

7800-530: The competition, but we were notified that Blizzard was preparing a competition with another broadcast. Until that notification, OGN had been preparing for the next season, so we are very regretful." The first Overwatch Contenders Gauntlet, the premier tournament in the Contenders series, took place at the OGN Giga Arena, the venue that hosted the Apex tournament. In the Overwatch League's 2021 season,

7920-472: The corresponding short distances between urban centres was crucial. Certainly it provided the opportunity for more clubs' developing large fan bases without incurring great travel costs. Professional football did not gain acceptance until after the turn of the 20th century in most of Southern England . The earliest league members travelled only through the Midlands and North . When The Football League (now

8040-553: The division below. Such variations usually cause a "knock-on" effect through the lower divisions. For example, in 1995 the Premier League voted to reduce its numbers by two and achieved the desired change by relegating four teams instead of the usual three, whilst allowing only two promotions from Football League Division One . Even in the absence of such extraordinary circumstances, the pyramid-like nature of most European sports league systems can still create knock-on effects at

8160-477: The earliest American sport to develop professional leagues, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) was established in 1857 as a national governing body for the game. In many respects, it would resemble England's Football Association when founded in 1863. Both espoused strict amateurism in their early years and welcomed hundreds of clubs as members. Baseball's National Association

8280-405: The end of 1993, Adham changed the name to "Chaos Studios", reflecting on the haphazardness of their development processes. Near this same time, the company started to explore options in publishing their own games, as their conversion contracts were not as lucrative for the company. Inspired by the multiplayer aspects of Westwood Studios ' Dune II and the high fantasy setting of The Lord of

8400-600: The end of 2021, leaving Ybarra as the sole leader of Blizzard. As a result of the California lawsuit and of delays and release issues with their more recent games, Activision Blizzard's stock faced severe pressure. Subsequently, Microsoft seized the opportunity to become one of the largest video game companies in the world and announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard and its subsidiaries, including Blizzard, for $ 68.7 billion in January 2022. This exchange marks

8520-923: The exception of World of Warcraft , still being handled by The9. The two companies established the Shanghai EaseNet Network Technology for managing the games within China. Blizzard and The9 prepared to launch the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King , but the expansion came under scrutiny by China's content regulation board, the General Administration of Press and Publication , which rejected publication of it within China in March 2009, even with preliminary modifications made by The9 to clear it. Rumors of Blizzard's dissatisfaction with The9 from this and other previous complications with World of Warcraft came to

8640-445: The executives decided to change the studio's name to "Ogre Studios" by April 1994. However, Davidson & Associates did not like this name, and forced the company to change it. According to Morhaime, Adham began running through a dictionary from the start, writing down any word that seemed interesting and passing it to the legal department to see if it had any complications. One of the first words they found to be interesting and cleared

8760-483: The financial hit that clubs take whilst dropping out of the Premier League. However, in many cases, these parachute payments just serve to inflate the costs of competing for promotion among the lower division clubs as newly relegated teams retain a financial advantage. In some countries and at certain levels, teams in line for promotion may have to satisfy certain non-playing conditions in order to be accepted by

8880-478: The financial value of such games in terms of ticket sales and media rights . This explained why in the 2020s, association football leagues were collectively bringing in annually only about two times the revenue of the National Football League ( the wealthiest sports league in the world ), even though association football had eight times the number of fans worldwide as American football . It

9000-460: The first season, MVP Space, Rhinos Gaming Titan, and Mighty Storm did not qualify, while MVP Infinity , Meta Athena, and Afreeca Freecs Red qualified for the group stage. The Western teams invited were Team EnVyUs, Fnatic , Cloud9 , and Misfits . The season began with its first group stage on January 17, 2017, in Seoul , South Korea. The third season followed the same format as the second, with

9120-407: The founders that they would have creative control over the games they developed. Adham and Morhaime accepted the offer in early 1994. Shortly after the sale, they were contacted by a Florida company, Chaos Technologies, who claims their trademark rights on the name "Chaos" and wanted the company to pay US$ 100,000 (equivalent to $ 205,568 in 2023) to keep the name. Not wanting to pay that sum,

9240-463: The four gave their resignations to Blizzard's management on June 30, 2003. As part of this, a significant portion of Blizzard North's staff were laid off, additional work on Starblo was terminated and the remaining team focused Diablo III . Blizzard's management made the decision August 2005 to consolidate Blizzard North into Blizzard Entertainment, relocating staff to the main Blizzard offices in Irvine. In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in

9360-549: The four western clubs at the end of the season. The NL's dominance of baseball was challenged several times after its first few years, but only by entire leagues. Eight clubs, the established norm for a national league, was a prohibitively high threshold for a new venture. Two challengers succeeded beyond the short-term, with the National League fighting off a challenge from the American Association after

9480-580: The game and for other Diablo games including Diablo IV . Vicarious was completely merged into Blizzard by April 12, 2022, thereby being renamed Blizzard Albany. In celebration of the company's 30th anniversary, Blizzard Entertainment released a compilation called Blizzard Arcade Collection in February 2021, for various video game platforms. The collection includes their three classic video games: The Lost Vikings , Rock n' Roll Racing , and Blackthorne , each of which containing additional upgrades and numerous modern features. Activision Blizzard

9600-668: The games directly rather than run the license through a joint venture, and Activision Blizzard's concerns that NetEase was trying to start their own ventures, including the $ 100 million payment towards Bungie in 2018. NetEase was further concerned about the impact of the pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft . Activision Blizzard stated they were looking to other Chinese firms as replacements for NetEase as to restore their games in China. By April 2024, Blizzard, with Microsoft's help, and NetEase had agreed to new publishing terms, with plans to bring back Blizzard's games to China by mid-2024, maintaining all prior game ownership from

9720-461: The globe. As of June 2015 , the company's headquarters in Irvine, California had 2,622 employees. By 2018, a rift had developed between Kotick and Morhaime on how Blizzard should continue developing its games, with Morhaime wanting to allow the developers the freedom to experiment while Kotick was focused on generating profit. Morhaime had considered resigning in 2017 but Kotick convinced him to stay on. Morhaime announced his plans to step down as

9840-406: The higher league, such as financial solvency, stadium capacity, and facilities. If these are not satisfied, a lower-ranked team may be promoted in their place, or a team in the league above may be saved from relegation. While the primary purpose of the promotion and relegation system is to maintain competitive balance, it may also be used as a disciplinary tool in special cases. On several occasions,

9960-533: The highly popular World of Warcraft . By the end of the decade, Blizzard also found success with the action role-playing game Diablo (1997) and strategy game StarCraft (1998). The company became part of Vivendi Games in 1998, which would then merge with Activision in 2008, culminating in the inclusion of the Blizzard brand name in the title of the resulting holding company; Activision Blizzard became completely independent from Vivendi in 2013. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023, maintaining that

10080-413: The hundreds, as well as a large amount of crunch development to complete the game. In January 2004, Adham announced he was leaving the company from being burnt out over his work on World of Warcraft , transferring management to Morhaime. World of Warcraft was released on November 23, 2004, in North America, and on February 11, 2005, in Europe. By December 2004, the game was the fastest-selling PC game in

10200-678: The importance of games played by many low-ranked teams near the end of the season, which may be at risk of relegation. In contrast, the final games of a low-ranked US or Canadian team serve little purpose, and in fact losing may be beneficial to such teams because they offer a better position in the next year's draft . Although not intrinsic to the system, problems can occur due to the differing monetary payouts and revenue-generating potential that different divisions provide to their clubs. For example, financial hardship has sometimes occurred in leagues where clubs do not reduce their wage bill once relegated. This usually occurs for one of two reasons: first,

10320-535: The influence on real-time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena genre. Many of the characters, locations and concepts introduced in Warcraft III and its expansion went on to play major roles in numerous future Blizzard's titles. In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles, The Lost Vikings , Rock n' Roll Racing and Blackthorne , from Interplay Entertainment and re-release them for

10440-777: The largest acquisition in tech history, surpassing the $ 67 billion Dell-EMC merger from 2016. The deal closed on October 13, 2023, and Activision Blizzard moved into the Microsoft Gaming division. Blizzard acquired Proletariat , the developers of Spellbreak , in June 2022 as to help support World of Warcraft . The 100-employee studio remained in Boston but will shutter Spellbreak as they move onto Warcraft . Ahead of their license renewal in January 2023, Blizzard (via Activision Blizzard) and NetEase stated in November 2022 that they had been unable to come to an agreement on

10560-437: The league produced a hype video for one of their matches that was reminiscent of the videos that OGN produced for Apex. Promotion and relegation Promotion and relegation is used by sports leagues as a process where teams can move up and down among divisions in a League system , based on their performance over a season . Leagues that use promotion and relegation systems are sometimes called open leagues. In

10680-435: The legal check was "blizzard", leading them to change their name to "Blizzard Entertainment" by May 1994. Warcraft was released in November 1994, and within a year, helped to establish Blizzard among other development studios like Westwood. Blizzard Entertainment has changed hands several times since then. Davidson was acquired along with Sierra On-Line by a company called CUC International in 1996. CUC then merged with

10800-418: The look of player's game. Additionally, it contains upgrades for each game such as enhanced local multiplayer for The Lost Vikings , new songs and artist performances for Rock n' Roll Racing , as well as a new level map for Blackthorne. A digital museum, which is included in the collection, features game art, unused content, and interviews. Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of

10920-480: The lowest number since the end of 2006, prior to The Burning Crusade expansion. However, World of Warcraft is still the world's most-subscribed MMORPG, and holds the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG by subscribers. In 2008, Blizzard was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the creation of World of Warcraft . Mike Morhaime accepted

11040-421: The matches played for the championship in the last seasons are included in the coefficient for the clubs. Teams have an incentive to score points in every match of the season, meaning teams that are not challenging for the title or fighting relegation in the current season want to win even in the final matches to reduce the risk of relegation in the next season; examples are Club Atlético Banfield being champion of

11160-543: The merger was complete, with Vivendi Games effectively dissolved except for Blizzard Entertainment, and the new company was named Activision Blizzard . Blizzard established a distribution agreement with the Chinese company NetEase in August 2008 to publish Blizzard's games in China. The deal focused on StarCraft II which was gaining popularity as an esport within southeast Asia, as well as for other Blizzard games with

11280-466: The online qualifiers of first season. Twelve South Korean teams, Afreeca Freecs Blue , MVP Space , BK Stars, Luxury Watch Blue, Rhinos Gaming Titan, Flash Lux, Mighty Storm, KongDoo Panthera, Kongdoo Uncia, RunAway , CONBOX T6, and Lunatic-Hai, qualified for the main league. Additionally two North American teams, Team EnVyUs and NRG Esports , and two European teams, Rogue and Reunited, were invited to compete in season one. English broadcasts featured

11400-644: The organizer, the most important being the ESL Pro Tour as of 2021 . Most professional League of Legends leagues like the League of Legends Championship Series and League of Legends Champions Korea used a promotion and relegation system, although the LCS moved away from this in 2018 for North America LCS and 2019 for the European LCS (which was renamed to the League of Legends European Championship ), while

11520-482: The original publishing deal. Under this new deal, NetEase also will be able to bring games to the Xbox platform. Following completion of the acquisition, Microsoft announced it was laying off 1,900 staff from Microsoft Gaming on January 25, 2024. Alongside this, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra and Chief Design Officer Allen Adham announced they would be leaving the company. Further, the planned survival game from Blizzard

11640-786: The possibility of competing against higher ranked nations as a sport grows. Other international tournaments which employ promotion and relegation include the Ice Hockey World Championships , Bandy World Championships , Floorball World Championships , the UEFA Nations League , the CONCACAF Nations League , the World Cricket League and the European Team Championships in athletics. In baseball,

11760-404: The regional level. For example, in a higher league with a large geographical footprint and multiple feeder leagues each representing smaller geographical regions, should most or all of the relegated teams in the higher division come from one particular region then the number of teams to be promoted or relegated from each of the feeder leagues may have to be adjusted, or one or more teams playing near

11880-469: The release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), Diablo (1997), and StarCraft (1998), the focus has been almost exclusively on those three franchises. Overwatch (2016) became an exception years later, bringing the number of main franchises to four. Each franchise is supported by other media based around its intellectual property such as novels, collectible card games, comics and video shorts. Blizzard announced in 2006 that they would be producing

12000-433: The release of Starcraft , with development led by Duane Stinnett. Nomad was inspired by the tabletop role playing game Necromunda that was played in a post-apocalyptic setting . The project had vague goals, and around that time, many of the staff of Blizzard began playing MMORPGs EverQuest and Ultima Online . Nomad was cancelled in 1999 as Blizzard shifted to making their own MMORPG, World of Warcraft . In

12120-436: The renewal terms for their license, and thus most Blizzard games will cease operations in China in January 2023 until the situation can be resolved. According to a report by The New York Times , several factors influenced Activision Blizzard's decision to terminate the agreement, which included stronger demands made by the Chinese government to know of Activision Blizzard's internal business matters, NetEase's desire to license

12240-479: The same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi . Blizzard, at this point numbering about 200 employees, became part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi. In 1996, Blizzard Entertainment acquired Condor Games of San Mateo, California , which had been working on the action role-playing game (ARPG) Diablo for Blizzard at the time, and was led by David Brevik and brothers Max and Erick Schaefer. Condor

12360-480: The second season of Apex. The league added a double-elimination bracket between the group stage and the playoffs, and the top four teams from the double-elimination bracket advanced to the playoffs. Additionally, teams were allotted one timeout in the middle of a match. The second season was contested by twelve South Korean teams, three North American teams, and one European team. Of the South Korean teams from

12480-502: The second season onwards. Seasons began with group stages, followed by playoffs. Each match in the season was a best-of-five series, aside from the finals, which was a best-of-seven series. On September 16, 2016, OnGameNet , a South Korean cable television channel that specialized in broadcasting video game -related content and esports matches, announced that it would be hosting a 16-team Overwatch league called OGN Apex. A total of 1,531 people from 230 South Korean teams signed up for

12600-627: The teams from the Legends Stage (Now known as the Elimination Stage ) from the previous Major automatically qualify for their RMRs and are joined by online qualifiers. From 1993 until 2003, the Eurovision Song Contest used various systems of relegation to reconcile the number of countries wishing to participate (approximately 30 at the time) with the number of performances allowed considering time constraints of

12720-456: The twelve-team group stage, eight-team double-elimination bracket, and a four-team playoff. The league introduced a new rule in which teams were allowed to substitute players between maps; with this rule change, many teams increased the number of players on their roster from six to seven or more. English casting duo Mykles and Lonnquist departed from Apex to prepare for Blizzard Entertainment 's upcoming Overwatch League . The league reduced

12840-607: The wake of the 2018 layoffs, two projects were cancelled: One was codenamed Orion , an asynchronous card game for mobile devices designed by Hearthstone developers. While the game was considered fun to play when players were engaged in real time, the asynchronous aspect diluted the enjoyment of the. The second, codenamed Ares , was a first-person shooter within the Starcraft universe inspired by Electronic Arts ' Battlefield series that had been in development for three years. After seven years of development, Blizzard revealed

12960-413: The wake of these events, Brack, one of the few individuals directly named in the suit, announced he was leaving Blizzard to "pursue new opportunities", and will be replaced by co-leads Jen Oneal, the lead of Vicarious Visions and the first woman in a leadership role for the company, and Mike Ybarra, a Blizzard executive vice president. Oneal announced in November 2021 that she would be leaving the company by

13080-655: Was canceled. On January 29, 2024, Johanna Faries, the former general manager of the Call of Duty series, was named Blizzard Entertainment's new president, taking office on February 5. Following the unionization success of Raven Software 's Game Workers Alliance (GWA) union for quality assurance (QA) testers , the 20-member QA team of Blizzard Albany announced a unionization drive in July 2022 as GWA Albany. The vote passed (14–0). On July 24, 2024, 500 artists, designers, engineers, producers, and quality assurance testers who work on World of Warcraft voted to unionize under

13200-811: Was estimated to hold 62 percent of the MMORPG subscription market. With the success of World of Warcraft , Blizzard Entertainment organized the first BlizzCon fan convention in October 2005 held at the Anaheim Convention Center . The inaugural event drew about 6,000 people and became an annual event which Blizzard uses to announce new games, expansions, and content for its properties. Blizzard's staff quadrupled from around 400 employees in 2004 to 1600 by 2006 to provide more resources to World of Warcraft and its various expansions. To deal with its growing staff, Blizzard moved their headquarters from

13320-649: Was highly successful, and was the highest-selling game on PC for 2016. Several traditional esport events had been established within the year of Overwatch 's release, such as the Overwatch World Cup , but Blizzard continued to expand this and announced the first esports professional league, the Overwatch League at the 2016 BlizzCon event. The company purchased a studio at The Burbank Studios in Burbank, California , that it converted into

13440-408: Was insufficient to ensure adequate parity in any given game or the overall financial performance of a sport (as distinguished from individual players or teams). Most importantly, the failure of most association football leagues to adequately regulate individual player compensation (that is, by imposing salary caps ) had resulted in too many games ending in predictable blowouts , and thereby reduced

13560-580: Was leaving the company after 20 years in March 2020. On January 22, 2021, Activision transferred Vicarious Visions over to Blizzard Entertainment, stating that the Vicarious Visions team had better opportunity for long-term support for Blizzard. Vicarious had been working with Blizzard for about two years prior to this announcement on the planned remaster of Diablo II , Diablo II: Resurrected , and according to Brack, it made sense to incorporate Vicarious into Blizzard for ongoing support of

13680-419: Was not able to survive the onset of professionalism . It responded to the trend – clubs secretly paying or indirectly compensating players – by establishing a "professional" class for 1869. As quickly as 1871, most of those clubs broke away and formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP). That new, professional Association was open at a modest fee, but it proved to be unstable. It

13800-471: Was open to a merger, but would only allow it if he controlled the majority of the combined company, knowing the value of World of Warcraft to Kotick. Among those Kotick spoke to for advice included Blizzard's Morhaime, who told Kotick that they had begun establishing lucrative in-roads into the Chinese market . Kotick accepted Lévy's deal, with the deal approved by shareholders in December 2007. By July 2008,

13920-426: Was renamed Blizzard North , with Blizzard's existing Irvine studios colloquially referred as Blizzard South. Diablo was released at the very start of 1997 alongside Battle.net , a matchmaking service for the game. Blizzard North developed the sequel Diablo II (2000), and its expansion pack Lord of Destruction (2001). Following the success of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness , Blizzard began development on

14040-496: Was replaced by the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs in 1876, which has endured to the present day. The founders of the new League judged that in order to prosper, they must make baseball's highest level of competition a franchise based system with exclusive membership, a strict limit on the number of teams, and each member having exclusive rights to their local market. The modest National League guarantee of

14160-589: Was reportedly because of such evidence that the EuroLeague adopted mandatory salary bands in September 2024. Promotion and relegation is used in international sports leagues such as in Europe , and many other parts of the world. It may be used in international sports tournaments. In tennis, the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup have promotion and relegation, with a 'World Group' (split into two divisions in

14280-506: Was the subject of a lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in July 2021, asserting that for several years the management within Blizzard as well as Activision promoted a "frat boy" atmosphere that allowed and encouraged sexual misconduct towards female employees and discrimination in hiring practices. The lawsuit drew a large response from employees and groups outside of Activision Blizzard. In

14400-520: Was transitioning to the seventh generation . Blizzard decided to cancel Ghost rather than extend its development period to work on the newer consoles. Blizzard started to work on a sequel to the Warcraft II in early 1998, which was announced as a "role-playing strategy" game. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos , the third title set in the Warcraft fictional universe, was released in July 2002. Warcraft III has inspired many future games, having

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