Blizzard

Blizzard is a gaming industry mainstay. This team has an uncanny ability to take a game genre and put their own unique spin on it, instantly making the game more accessible and enjoyable to the average player. That approach does not sit well with everyone. Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm has all the fun of a traditional MOBA without the frustration. Matches are fast-paced, there are no items to purchase, and there are numerous maps to battle on, each with its own set of win conditions or special effects. Then there's Diablo 3, an excellent ARPG that foregoes much of the complexity of its predecessors in favor of a simpler, approachable experience that you can easily drop into with your friends. Overwatch, Hearthstone, and the World of Warcraft of 2021 have all adopted similar strategies, and despite their troubles, are still heralded as some of the best games in their respective genres.

Even in the early days of World of Warcraft, a game that didn't invent the MMORPG genre but certainly advanced it significantly, Blizzard prioritized accessibility. There was no need to run across multiple continents to reach your corpse after death, and leveling solo through quests was actually possible, whereas it was impossible in early Everquest. PvP gameplay in WoW was also more forgiving, with the worst penalty being time lost from corpse running. In vanilla Everquest, the player who killed you could steal any of your items, regardless of how rare or valuable they were.

Detailed Information:

Founded: February 1991
Genre specialty: Various
Notable franchises: Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo

Website: blizzard.com/en-us