who owns blizzard

Blizzard Entertainment is owned by Microsoft.

Quick Scoop

• Blizzard Entertainment is a video game developer and publisher best known for Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft.

• Blizzard used to be a division of Activision Blizzard, the large holding company that also included Activision and mobile studio King.

• On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced a plan to acquire Activision Blizzard (and thus Blizzard Entertainment) in a deal valued at about 68.7 billion dollars.

• The acquisition completed on October 13, 2023, making Activision Blizzard (and Blizzard as one of its main divisions) a subsidiary of Microsoft Gaming, alongside Xbox Game Studios and ZeniMax Media.

• So in corporate terms:
  • Immediate parent: Activision Blizzard, Inc. (now part of Microsoft’s gaming group).

* Ultimate owner: Microsoft Corporation.

Mini context: why people still say “Activision Blizzard”

Even after the acquisition, you’ll still see players and news outlets saying things like “Activision Blizzard owns World of Warcraft” or “Activision is ruining Blizzard” because the combined company structure (Activision, Blizzard, King under one umbrella) is still how games are organized internally. In legal and stock-market terms, though, Activision Blizzard itself now sits under Microsoft, so Blizzard is no longer an independent or publicly traded entity; it’s part of Microsoft’s gaming empire.

In short: Blizzard isn’t its own boss; it lives inside Activision Blizzard, which in turn lives inside Microsoft Gaming.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.