Blizzard Entertainment is a subsidiary of the iconic gaming company Activision. Blizzard Entertainment is a gaming company, but they also make clothing, action figures, trading cards, and more. Blizzard makes the World of Warcraft game, which is why I chose them as my company. I've been playing World of Warcraft for almost 10 years now and it has completely captured my attention and taken up a lot of my life over the years. From my research, I hope to learn more about how this massive empire came to be, since it paved the way for so many massively multiplayer online role-playing game companies. Blizzard Entertainment is a record-breaking gaming company with a proven track record of releasing #1 games. 1, which has lasted for more than 20 years. They have won countless awards and have millions of devoted players around the world. In 2015, Statista estimated that World of Warcraft alone had 5.5 million subscribers worldwide.1 [Number of World of Warcraft subscribers from Q1 2005 to Q3 2015. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/.]. In addition to World of Warcraft, Blizzard has also published other bestsellers such as the Diablo series, Hearthstone, Overwatch (which reached 7 million players in its first week), Heroes of the Storm and the Starcraft series. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original EssayBlizzard Entertainment was founded in 1991, originally as a third-party development and software engineering company for other big names like Sega Genesis and Macintosh.2 [Company Profile. (2016). Retrieved from http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/profile.html.] The company's headquarters is located in Irvine, California, but it currently has offices in 11 different cities around the world . The headquarters employs 2,622 people, while the total number of Blizzard employees is close to 5,000. They are publicly traded and their top 5 holders are FMR LLC (105,342,767 shares), Vanguard Group Inc. (33,277,915 shares), Ameriprise Financial Inc. (30,276,592 shares), State Street Corp. (19,349,183 shares ) and Invesco LTD. (15,354,375 shares). Blizzard is listed on the NASDAQ, under the name ATVI. Buying shares right now would cost you $43,96.3 [Activision Blizzard, Inc. Ownership Summary. (October 6, 2016) Retrieved from http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/atvi/ownership-summary.].They could There are many external threats to Blizzard and its success. Blizzard is a lot like Walmart in the sense that it has found a niche and has mostly cornered the market. It's always possible that some smaller company will come out with a game so compelling that it will rise to the top and threaten the massive empire that is Blizzard, but that won't happen anytime soon. Blizzard's success has declined somewhat in recent years in terms of the size of its subscriber base and also its stock price. Any company can only stay at the top for a certain period. However, the gaming industry is a little different. Each company has something completely different to offer, so it doesn't matter if it gets knocked out of the top spot, it will always have people following it. In today's world, with all the technological advancements happening at such a rapid pace, the expansion opportunities for Blizzard are endless. They could come out with a virtual reality game, they always have their own franchises to fall back on, which will always sell no matter what, simply because people have dedicated years of their lives to these games. They could acquire smaller companies to increase profits, they could probably stop releasing new content altogether and stick around as long as the servers.