Blizzard president Johanna Faries penned a dev blog to the Blizzard community last night, with kind words for players and developers alongside one of those infographics that offer a lot of numbers but none of the ones actual players or analysts would find particularly useful for judging the games’ health.
To wit, the graphic claims players of all of Blizzard’s games outside of China – World of Warcraft, Overwatch 2, Hearthstone, the Diablo franchise, Heroes of the Storm, and we assume the rest of the games in the Warcraft and StarCraft franchises – clocked 8.34B hours total and sent 378M messages in-game. The only stat for World of Warcraft given is that players killed 4.5B spiders and nerubians. Yeah, you show those spiders who’s boss.
Not noted in the graphic or post? The over 500 World of Warcraft devs who unionized in Irvine this year. That’s a good number too! We might also note that around 1200 Activision-Blizzard workers were laid off in 2024 alone. But we suppose it’s more important that Diablo IV players killed 1.7T demons. Eh, at least she didn’t actively fib with a mystery line as the company did earlier this year.
In addition to chronicling the company’s charity initiatives, Faries does reiterate that Blizzard and NetEase renewed their partnership this year to restore at least some of the games to the Chinese region, following the death of that partnership in the final years before Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard. (The deal we noted included Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV, which are not mentioned here.)
“Earlier this year, we were overjoyed to bring Blizzard games back to mainland China in partnership with NetEase. We love being able to serve our players in China once more and to successfully welcome so many back to both World of Warcraft and Hearthstone in the region. The messages we have received from players returning both to Azeroth and the Tavern remind us of the power of our games to unite us in our shared passion—and this is just the beginning.”
The post also refers to “revisiting tradition” at GDC and Gamescom but does not mention that the Blizzard-specific tradition of BlizzCon was again canceled.
As for the future, all Faries says is that “2025 is poised to be another big year of new and exciting experiences to come.” No details are given at all, which seems a bit odd since most of the Blizzard teams delivered clear roadmaps in November, so Blizzard could’ve just embedded them and made this sound less ominous. We’ll do that for it. No reason to make the teams look dodgy here!
Anyway, here’s Wonderwall the infographic.
