The Mouth of Blizzard has shown up at the gates of their Irvine fortress waving an approximate figure for digital and physical sales of Heart of the Swarm during its launch. It has loads of zeros attached.
Last Friday, while rumors swirled that IPL 6 was definitely cancelled and the LCS “super week" continued its marathon, a small audience gathered on the second floor of the Boston Convention and Exposition Center to hear the heads of Blizzard, MLG, Twitch, and the Houston Rockets basketball team talk about how eSports have grown in the last two years.
A substantial Wings of Liberty patch for Starcraft 2, which will bring the game up to version 2.0.4, is “on the horizon" according to a post on the game’s official forum. The patch will revamp the menu screens, as well as Clans and Groups, and add new replay features.
I have a feeling this is what they call ‘business sense’. Game makes money, make more game. Diablo 3 sold 12 million copies in 2012 - a two mil increase since November - and so Blizzard will continue to “support the franchise and the community".Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Blizzard have seen an “evolution in player behaviour" since the release of WoW’s third expansion, Cataclysm, two years ago. The Darwinian change has been such that the company has adapted its strategy of late to release smaller WoW updates more frequently. Find out why after the break.
And so this curious and probably irreversible trend for throwing the opening cinematics of games out of the nest without a game to back them up continues. Sometime in March, we’ll boot up Heart of the Swarm for the first time and go, “Oh yeah. I remember this one."
While the release of Starcraft 2’s second episode is currently slated for 2013 and consequently ages off, in a couple of weeks it’ll be due out ‘this year’, which means ‘imminently’. To prepare for that binary switch, Blizzard are making room for more players in their ongoing beta test. Any players who pre-purchased the game before December 18th are now flagged for beta access, and any who digitally pre-order from now on will be added to the beta “in waves" every week or so.
As president and CEO of Blizzard, Mike Morhaime underlines Blizzard’s commitment to StarCraft and its thriving pro community every time he appears at a tournament. It’s an increasingly important message to send: during the autumn, the StarCraft community seemed to be getting morose about its own future, and Blizzard’s ability to help it grow. Since then, Blizzard have been pushing back and trying to reassure the community that not only will Heart of the Swarm be a strong expansion, but that Blizzard hear and understand the the community’s concerns. With Morhaime in the audience, they can hardly miss it.
One of the current questions and arguments that surrounds eSports is the role of free-to-play in growing the eSports community. On the one hand, there’s the belief that free-to-play games, with low barriers to entry, are better placed to grow and accelerate community growth. 
Most StarCraft leagues are still Pay Per View, but this weekend’s StarCraft 2 World Championship Finals in Shanghai were streamed for free so that any bugger might see them. The move represents the beginning of a conscious effort on Blizzard’s part to “lower the barrier for people who are interested and curious", says Mike Morhaime, who also talked about the company’s progress in breaking into developing economies.
This weekend sees 32 Starcraft 2 players and 10 World of Warcraft players finally come to terms with their place in the world leadership ladders. They've battled with uncertainty, they've trekked through ennui, and now they stand poised at the mountaint of definition, over the course of Saturday and Sunday thay will climb that mountain and they will know who is the best Starcraft 2 player of them all and who is better than all other World of Warcraft players at the Arena minigame.
An expansion pack is planned for Diablo, but Blizzard aren’t telling when it’ll get here.
We love Blizzard, but why they got to be so secretive sometimes? It’s a question that’s bothered us for years, often explained away with glum talk of corporate culture, now finally answered: All along, they’ve been busy organising a party and didn’t want to spoil the surprise, silly! 
It's been eight long years but World of Warcraft has been rescribed in Italian. 
Diablo 3 was the fastest selling PC games of all time, and in the three months(!) since its release has retained enough momentum that it’s now sold more than 10 million copies.
Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime has taken to the Diablo 3 forums to address concerns over the game's launch and to reassure players of the company's commitment to its future development, which is nice. He's also appreciative of the "candor and passion" with which fans have responded to the game. Candour and passion! Well that's one way of putting it. "While we can’t claim to have ever shipped a perfect game," admits Morhaime in the open letter, "we are committed to supporting our games relentlessly and making improvements where we can."
