While it seemed like enough people were in the perpetual Hearthstone beta that it seemed like it may as well been considered released, Blizzard announced that it’s free-to-play card game was officially open for business to all gamers.
On Tuesday afternoon, Blizzard officially announced that the inn was open and Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft was launched for all gamers to play.
The company in charge of production of the Americas region of the StarCraft II World Championship Series announced on Friday that they would be ceasing to produce WCS effective immediately. In a statement on their website, the North American Star League announced that they would no longer producing StarCraft content.
This fall, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft will have been around for ten years. Just ahead of its tenth anniversary, Blizzard announced that the flagship of the MMO genre reached the 100 million account milestone. Those 100 million players have created over 500 million characters in the world of Azeroth. Sure, WoW might not have as many players now as it did at its peak but it’s still the biggest game in MMOs.
For more about the last ten years of WoW, we have a handy infographic for you.
The beauty of sports is that anyone can win on any given weekend. That saying also extends to eSports. At this weekend’s StarCraft II World Championship Series Global Finals at BlizzCon, Korean Protoss sOs came in as the underdog 12th seed and beat four higher ranked players en route to winning the 2013 StarCraft World Championship.
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Blizzard All-Stars is dead! Long live Blizzard All-Stars!
Okay, it’s not actually dead. The Blizzard All-Stars of the name is dead though. Because you can’t have enough popular games with the acronym HotS, the not-so-secret Blizzard MOBA project has been rechristened Heroes of the Swarm.
I nearly forgot that Diablo III was released this week. Okay, it’s already been out for PC for almost a year-and-a-half but it’s now out for the current generation of consoles with a PS4 version planned for release next year.
What’s interesting about the console port is that many critics prefer it to the PC original. Noted improvements were the addition of offline play and the removal of the auction house (which was blamed for the necessity of always-online DRM in the PC version Diablo III). Critics also liked the addition of local co-op and the new control scheme which I would have thought would be the thing Blizzard would be most likely to struggle with given their PC development background. It’s good to hear this is a well done port and not a blatant cash grab.
Last week, we reported that Activision’s parent company (and majority owner) Vivendi was going to make the publisher pay out a massive dividend that would nearly tap all of Activision’s cash reserves.
Just days later, Activision decided that it wasn’t going to pay the dividend and indicated such by buying back Vivendi’s majority stake in the company in a deal with $5.83 billion.
Whether by design or whether it was unintentional, there will be some competition for your eSports attention during the second weekend of August. Blizzard’s StarCraft II World Championship Series Season 2 regional finals will be held on the same weekend of the Dota 2 world championship The International.
It looks like Activision Blizzard’s plan to whether any unexpected costs for the upcoming console launches and possible sales shortfalls as a result of economic uncertainty by leveraging a mountain of money may require a rethink.
A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Activision’s parent company Vivendi is planning to take a $2 billion cash dividend from the publisher to pay down its own debt.
PAX East isn’t known for big announcements and this year was no exception. However, there were a few noteworthy tidbits to come out of this year’s convention.
DuckTales Remastered
YES! YES! YES! DUCKTALES! MOTHERFUCKING DUCKTALES!
Sorry, let me compose myself for a minute. It’s a remake of the classic NES game based on the classic Disney cartoon, both of which we all know and love. In addition to the graphical updates, WayForward seems to have added a bit to the game as there are some parts of that trailer that I don’t recognize.
My only question (besides an actual release date) is about the music. The Moon level’s music is considered to be among the best pieces of music written in the 8-bit era. I’m hoping that the original music for that level comes back but as long as that piece comes back in some form or another.
et geekera 